Constructive Disobedience

Raumgestalt Repertoire 8: IDEAS / Associations presents processes and results of research teaching for sustainable architectural discussions, reception and production at the Chair of Spatial Form and Design, Prof. Oda Pälmke @ fatuk. 

A repertoire is the entirety of the pieces that an artist or collective can showcase at any given time. In this sense the inquiry serves as a drawn presentation and analysis of the architectural elements in the compilation of a collection of architectural references. This form repertoire constitutes the basis for an architectural discourse, constructive thinking and architectural design that not only starts with the individual solution of a problem but with the creation of a knowledge cosmos of ideas.

Subjectively assembled, touching fragments from art and architecture, theory and reality, are associatively merged to make a collection (card index) – devoid of hierarchy, sorting, and above all minus any claim to completeness. The constant reciprocal presentation of the found objects, memories, is an intensive critical appraisal of the crucial aspects of the work on view. The dialectical discourse produces surprising temporal insights (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and separately evolved concepts cross over and complement each other in the simultaneous consideration of architectural, artistic and theoretical positions. Thinking associatively opens up a sphere of possibilities – one idea leads to the next. The adoption of the fragments into the collection from their original spatial or temporal context is per se an abstraction: the scale of the things immediately becomes their ideal dimension. The design of a wall image web is the design-finding process for the meshwork of thoughts, and becomes continuously more complex. As an eye-catching visualisation of the interconnections between fragmentary ideas, manifesting the ‘never-ending’ process of realisations. So an image of the concentration on what is fundamental in the possible form develops. 

Looking at works So is a sensitisation and a set of guidelines for tolerance, in that one thing clearly emerges: there is no single correct result; rather there are innumerable possibly correct paths. The construction of the associative scope is a cooperative exercise, and through the decision-making discourse the rules of a true approach may anyway become defunct. The authors’ collective Raumgestalt therefore arrives at an intellectual construct, materialises a process, gives an idea shape and constructs guidelines on how to associatively join the parts to give a complex work that is more than the sum of its parts and refers to something than transcends itself. In this design process – which is in fact a classic one – the findings are sought after and found independently of materialisation, scale or worth. This process of construction, condensation, refinement at an intellectual level – initially independent of the material – is enriching and has an amplifying effect in questions of resources. At the same time the work understands itself as a collective form of teaching, capable of connecting and open for all of society. Knowledge and references enable a new appreciation of the elements that make up the built, potentially prolonging the longevity of what is So seen. Seeing So means looking again and conceptually deciding: build, don’t build, or rebuild, refine!