60 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
scale, zooming in and out. The quality of the line, the traces of the guidelines and the
grainy smudges on the paper are vestiges of the originating slowness of the material
study, and are now clearly visible in the time-based moving drawing. When resituated
into the heightened temporal medium of Premier, the static dormant element of the rail
becomes animated by its relationship with the user. As an independent, de-personalised
object, the handrail remains stationary, unmoving. Only at the point of contact with
the user’s hand is it activated, gaining an overt durational existence.
“Touchrail” demonstrates how our reconception of the project-space incorporates
pockets of slower material studies that, when combined with the moving drawing, jump
or swerve from the orbit of static techniques into time-based media and film. Concep-
tually speaking, the initial material study carried not only qualitative material, but
additional representational meaning and use (it was to be used as a visual display);
this is then allowed to interfere with a brief (a trade school) loaded with standardised
functionalist criteria. Each task embodies the same idea (an intimate architectural
component that is both useful and rhetorical), evolved through dif ferent orders of
matter, time and animation. The filmed object carries an uncanny material presence,
whilst reciprocally the object has slipped from the stasis of an authentic lump, into
the animate life of use, and from there into the active life of the building as a whole.
When read together as three coexisting material states, each fragment is temporally
compressed (slowed down to the point of near stasis), or expanded (animated) by the
next stage of re-presentation.
A Retrospective Matrix
The idea of introducing a slower, resistant grain into the project-space led us to formu-
late a plural matrix of qualitative values that attempts to incorporate particularising
factors and material states (Diagram 3).
Every architectural project will contain standardised data and decisions. Brief, con-
text and tectonics and so on - the x-axis - are for us unavoidable, integral parts of the
sequential, continuous design process. We hold to these criteria, accepting them as
positive constraints. The y-axis – the ‘particularising force of matter’ – enriches the
overall process, whilst the vertical z-axis represents the range of skills students are
able to acquire over the course of a single project. As shown in diagram , standardised
scenarios naturally break down under the influence of catalytic tasks, thereby forcing
the project-space to expand (distend) and contract (intensify). As the particularising
factor of materiality revalorises the design process according to slowness and creative
non-linearity, the result is an compacted project-space consisting of interactive states
that introduce multiple levels of temporality and meaning.
To conclude, the thick, slow mass of a project-space is a direct result of the forced
compression – simultaneity - of many elemental strands into a singular composite
space. The simultaneous introduction of multiple investigative elements allows design
to unfold along three fronts, which are then integrated at a critical threshold, at which
point they begin to test, extend and modify each other. By drawing in such additional
valence, projects can easily become laboratories for bundling and testing the relation-