There have been some changes in ADS5 at RCA over the summer. My teaching colleagues from last year – Justin Lau and Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui – have moved to the Bartlett, and instead this year I will be joined by Dr Victoria Watson (and later in the year Aran Chadwick from Atelier One). The studio will be known as the Department of Ontological Theatre.
Ontological Theatre: time-lapse image of Earth perceived by ISS International Space Station (NASA 2012)
ADS5 Dialectical Ecologies: Ontological Theatre
‘The language of architecture rests on the dialectic between memory of past architectural forms and the experiences of the present… [these] contradictions are thought of as being derived from ambiguity between real and virtual structure which is inherent in all architecture.’
Alan Colquhoun, Reflections on Complexity, Las Vegas and Oberlin (1978)
This studio will confront the contradictions of the present – ecological, economic, social, political, cultural, technological – but will attempt to do so through a strategic re-engagement with specific moments in the history of architecture. Rather than starting from surface level phenomena in the present, we will adopt a dialectical approach, tracing those contradictions back in time, identifying earlier dynamics. From here we will stage Ontological Theatre: architectural experiments into the nature of order, planning, design, and technology, and speculations about how we might think of matter, mind, social collectivity, and ecological systems in the future.
rheomode 