4.0 - PRELIMINARY DESIGN II WORLDING EXPERIMENTS 4.0.1 WORLDING EXPERIMENTS CONTEXT Dr Rachel Armstrong proposes that “mature toolsets” for challenges like the Anthropocene “do not yet exist. ... [Instead] they are nascent and being prototyped through the process of experiment” (Armstrong 67). Armstrong argues, “to achieve the necessary paradigm shift in the production of ecological architectures, many visions and strategies must be engaged” (64). In their book The Art of Experiment: Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design, and Gullström-Hughes propose ‘Worlding Experiments’ as a framework for experimental architecture to address contemporary and future challenges like the Anthropocene. Armstrong begins chapter five, “Extending Knowledge” with the provocation “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born... A revolution in the way we world our worlds is needed to counter the terrifying decline implicit of the Anthropocene” (Gullström-Hughes and Armstrong 51). Armstrong references Anna Tsing’s book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Tsing proposes we reflect on how we may “re-purpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of Progress to make visible the other worlds it has ignored and damaged” (Tsing 7). Armstrong suggests our current world “struggles most with [the] dynamics that question the human-centeredness of the planet” (Gullström-Hughes and Armstrong 52). Solutions for the Anthropocene cannot be derived from the human-centered world prescribed by the modern age. Armstrong argues:
We must reworld our world through the practice of worlding. First popularised in Beinjz and Time (Heidegger, 1978) by Martin Heidegger, who turned the noun (world...) into the active verb (worlding) and so proposed an ongoing, generative process of world making... (Gullström-Hughes and Armstrong 52).
4.0.2 WORLDING EXPERIMENTS FRAMEWORK Chapter 4, Preliminary Design will explore a series of ‘Worlding Experiments’. These experiments will be represented through architectural concepts, iteratively designed in line with this thesis’s aim and objectives. Armstrong and Hughes’ invocation for ‘(re)making our world’ is analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s, call for ‘new earth’. Both address a destabilised world by invoking new lines of thought through design. 'Worlding experiments' engage an assemblage of “concepts, contexts [and] material expressions” (Gullström-Hughes and Armstrong 55) Consequently, experiments in chapter 4 will be conducted through various media that include digital, sketch, modeling mixed media, model making and cinematics. These experiments will ‘re-purpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of Progress’ (Tsing 7) by utilising contemporary tools, such as simulation, game engines, 3D printing and CNC routing.
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