Darren Deane, Eleanor Suess Kingston University, United Kingdom 57
techniques and sites that situate slow mass against transient everydayness and other
virtual, rapid processes.
Growth through Density: The Project Space as Intensified Field
Innovation in design education falls into two broad categories. The first involves adjust-
ing the aims, objectives or formal endpoint of creativity, of ten through a search for
media and techniques that have visual consequences. This first type is to be contrasted
with a second: innovation applied to the project as a performative space, i.e. how cul-
tural materials and their content interact. Our efforts concentrate on the second strat-
egy: intensifying the immanent structure, internal order, or amplifying what animates a
project from within, as though it were somehow a second nature. We have set ourselves
the task of intensifying the project as a dense field of matter that in the hands of stu-
dents can be taken in various directions and at different paces.
The fictional writer Italo Calvino once declared “my working method has more often
than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes
from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities.” (Calvino, 1996,
3) We would argue that for architecture students sometimes the opposite is true. Forced
to start from nowhere, the first act can often be to assemble a thick field of data, similar
perhaps to Robert Smithson’s ‘Heap of Language’. We therefore avoid positing simple
starting points and single driving concepts, promoting instead the slow accretion of
elements into constellations of architectural matter, which in turn become potential
spaces for making design decisions.
It was the Belgian philosopher Eugene Dupréel who examined slowness, density and
consolidation in his Théorie de la consolidation of 1931, and which he opposed to the
notion of simple generative concepts:
Life has not moved from an original nucleus towards an indeterminate development:
it seems to have resulted from an advance from the external to the internal, from a
state of dispersal to a final state of continuity. It has never been like a beginning
from which a consequence results, but it was from the first like a frame that is filled,
or like an order that has gained in consistency through, if we may be permitted
to use the expression, a kind of gradual stuffing... Life is certainly growth, but all
growth that is in extension, like fabric that stretches or individuals that proliferate,
is only a particular case; life is essentially growth through density, an intensive
progress..^5 (As quoted in Bachelard, 2000, 95-6)Encouraged by such thoughts, we began re-structuring the project-space as a material
constellation out of which ideas emerge. The process of design is often spoken of as a
search for a friction-free, efficient system for expediting the so-called needs and func-
tions that drive architectural procurement. Perhaps in reaction to this, and the increas-
ing pressure to make every project socially compliant, we have begun to develop a non-
linear, friction-based model for a slow architectural project. In our view, if the trajectory
of design is towards mass, heaviness and weight, as opposed to being propelled by an