Against Abstraction: Relational Knowledges in Design

Catalog description

It is quite difficult to conceptualize architecture without abstraction. Abstraction is so rooted in our history of manipulating objects that it predates our species. Our ancestral Homo Erectus probably deserves the credit for separating the idea of fire from accidental bush burns, sparking (pun intended) the technological revolution. And yet abstraction is also about reduction, selecting a few ideas out of the messy experience of the world in order to operate more efficiently. Abstraction, as the definition goes, is the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events, or something that exists only as ideas. The key question here is which facts have been elevated to the realm of ideas and which facts have been discarded. In this course I depart from the provocation that abstraction - and more specifically spatial abstraction - is a root cause of both modernization and colonization (Escobar 1995) and that we experience today an overdose of spatial abstraction. The first four weeks of this course will examine the rise of spatial abstraction and the path that brought us here. The following 10 weeks will be devoted to relational knowledges: emotions, affects, phenomena, embodiment, and participatory processes that should vaccinate us against this overwhelming hegemony of spatial abstraction. Organized in seminars with weekly non-abstract workshops, this course will sensitize designers of all scales of the built environment to relational processes that enrich our understanding of the world and reconnect us with all others, humans and non-humans, that share our spaces.