Context

There are architects who have attempted to reset the inception of architecture to acknowledge a broader set of indeterminate terms. Examples might include the early automatic drawings of Coop Himmelblau or the poetic acts that initiate projects at Open City by teachers from the Catholic University in Valparaiso. These revolutionary practices place the poetic and romantic aspects of architectural inhabitation above other considerations. Alternatively, the work discussed here produces systems that value poetic sensibilities in architecture in such a way that appears to wear the logics, methods and apparatus of the world it critiques.

The importance of learning from the tools of explicit knowledge to develop tools for tacit knowledge has been outlined. Planetarium projectors and planetary mechanisms such as the orrery from the field of astronomy were studied, and while looking at projective techniques in habitat dioramas (32), other capacities became apparent. One was that the presentation of explicit knowledge in a literal and figurative presence provides an opportunity for viewers to reconstruct content for themselves as personal knowledge. Another was that the rich embodiment of knowledge in habitat dioramas provides an opportunity to learn what was intended, but also provokes a sense of wonder that ferments into possibilities beyond the specified content. While these lessons were bountiful, this is not the first project to gain nourishment for speculative questions from didactic instruments. Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–4) played off the French imperial metre, while in the architectural realm but in the name of rationalism Nikolai Ladovsky built his psycho-technical instruments in his laboratory at Vkhutein.

32 Elk diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Background painting by James Perry Wilson, 1941.