Week 11 Questions

Allen

1.) How should we handle the theories, often relevant, from history during times of Change in which they may no longer respond or apply? Creating off a basis or Completely new understanding?

2.) “…there are tactical practices- nomad practices of writing, thinking or acting- that are capable of manipulating and reforming theory’s proscriptive spaces…opaque and blind mobility” inserted into the clear text of the readable city..”

Tactical Practices: How can such tactical practices be more readily achieved in Architecture, thus incorporating diverse fields of knowledge that expand at more than the surface level of inspection?

3.) Can we, as designers, create meaning in architecture? Or can only the user attach meaning?

4.) Is it possible to eventually refine a design to accommodate the ‘unruly’ usage of spaces?


Spiller

5.) “They are extraordinary. They seem to have come fast and furious from his hands, almost torn from a fevered soul.”

How can this freedom of exploration be beneficial for us as designers? Used to generate greater outcomes? What does it liberate?

6.) “Like the fictional Poliphilo, Piranesi’s world attempted to construct meaning out of ruinous fabrics of an antiquated architecture.”

If applied to architecture, what would serve to be these ruinous fragments? How would we begin to piece them together?

7.) Are ‘memory theaters’ architecture? Are designers better at processing information this way? What other value does imagined space hold?

8.) How can drawings like on page 17 be used in design? Is it just a way to express ideas that are not strictly spatial? What is expressed in this image?


Woods

9.) “Because governments and corporations cannot be expected to take the initiative in establishing new and multilayered societies, the impetus for their creation must come from below, from people who begin to build directly, without the sanction of any institutionalized authority.”

What advantages can be achieved that may not be readily achieved otherwise when you build from below, from the placement of the common man and collective knowledge of the citizens, versus a top down approach, oriented from public policy or political dignitaries?

10.) “Who owns free-spaces? Those who make them their own. Those whose lives, day to day, consecrate space with their own densities of meaning.”

How can we accommodate and learn from the people who utilize the free-spaces, even as it applies to our studio project? How can spaces be used to alleviate deterministic control and inhabit the wills of the free-space user, allowing them to make their own “densities of meaning”? Or is this even possible from a top down approach? Will anything we build be construed differently by those who use it?

11.) By allowing space to evolve based on users, outside the control of an overarching design, would programming and creating purposeful space become obsolete? In other words, can there be too much freedom in the built environment?

12.) Are the twenty tactics at the end of the article well balanced in their approach to design, or do they lean toward a more top or bottom heavy approach to design policy? What are your opinions on how a new practice should be handled?