Taking the Waters

Water, a necessity of sustenance … Water gives life … Water for ablution of body and of soul … Water for reflection, both visual and intellectual …

Light and sound are palpable materials of architectural containment and are simultaneously the principal forms of its occupation. Traditional spatial composition has relied on surfaces of resistance and reflection; space can be understood as the dissolving and blurring of the visual and the aural at the limits of perception and tactility.

Discussions in the academy and in experimental practice are focused on responsive architectures and interactive interfaces; this work posits the concept of generative architectures in terms of materials, hybrid systems, and controls through improvised and scripted tenancies as acts of invention and innovation.

There are many thresholds of concern: interior to exterior, architecture to landscape, forest to garden, public to private …

Movement through liquid

Water serves as a lens to manipulate and to understand both light and sound. In glass, we find ourselves moving ever so slowly, almost at a standstill, yet still we sense depth and thickness of surface, and return to the idea of matter and materiality.

Mater or mother, material, materiality, matter

The performative qualities of materiality take precedence over the physical or nominally substantive qualities of firmness, of softness, of weight and impermeability, impenetrable in their resistance to emotive qualities and the ability to transform.

The project for this term is an urban natatorium. Be it a bourgeois indulgence, an amenity for the advantaged citizens of the city, the natatorium is a broadly based descriptor for a variety of water-based facilities in the constructed landscape of the contemporary city, embracing a range of possibilities:

– a public fountain or well, – a public bathhouse, – a swimming pool(s), – a spa as a traditional place of healing and health, – a water treatment or sewage plant, – hydroponic gardens or fish farming, productive agricultures.

14.00–18.00

David Lieberman

11 ADP

ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION

The research and the project provide an opportunity to explore different cultural traditions, spaces of community engagement, and both personal and collective identity. The optimistic and somewhat idealistic ambition and intent is that the future might offer unknown experiences.

If architectural composition is the creative synthesis of programmatic logic, it requires an artisan’s sensibility for materials and details. The poetic concerns for colour, light and texture choreographed in spatial sensibilities of sensual delight reside in the eloquence of built form. To imagine necessitates the aspiration to build. Architects must build with an understanding of the body of the project, the skeleton, the musculature, the tendons and ligaments, the flesh and the skin, not to mention the veils of revealing and concealing in the garments that clothe.

Materials are to be selected for their visual, aural, and tactile acuity with the precision and clarity of an instrument maker seeking to find the voice within a piece of wood, carefully selected for its weight, its colour, and its feel. Emerging technologies, hybrid materials, digital composition and fabrication, and the management and sequence of processes of assembly have greatly expanded the possibilities of building, offering opportunities for invention and innovation.

Building is an act of argument and debate, not resignation and compromise. There are many ways to think and many ways to build. What, then, is the promise held by the aspiration and invention in the act of “making”? To build is, indeed, the question.