Homing Objects: From Writing to Making

Can architects design with words? Can they move from words to models and then hands on making, bypassing the medium of drawing altogether? Can they use language to imagine future scenarios and spatial possibilities in different ways than through drawings? “Homing Objects” was a recent four-week workshop that tested these possibilities within the master level studio course The Space of Words, at Delft University of Technology. The workshop asked architecture students to fabricate unprecedented domestic objects that were dreamed up and “drawn out” through language. At stake is our wager that writing tends to essential aspects of the architect’s imagination that run the risk of being severely diminished in a world captivated by the ocular dominance of compelling images. We argue that, especially when it comes to cultivating the future architect’s imagination, language can push beyond what something “looks like” and refocus attention to what something “feels like” more effectively than drawing in a number of ways: Language can engage multi-sensory qualities, experientially-layered aspects of space. Language can likewise more explicitly engage with the temporal thickness of space and experience – ranging from ephemeral conditions and rituals, to traces of memory, as well as human and natural histories. Finally, language can precipitate a haptically-focused making process, which further cultivates the architect’s imagination by drawing on and building onto tacit and embodied knowledge about materials and making.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.112.73

Volume Editors
Germane Barnes & Blair Satterfield

ISBN
978-1-944214-45-6