INTRODUCTION:

Body & Space Morphologies: Content, Overall Aims and Methods

Body and Space Morphologies is a research-based teaching program placed in the field of Architecture & Culture studies. Dedicated to Phenomenology in Architecture, the program offers Trans-Disciplinary master studios in explorative architectural and pre-architectural making, sensing and thinking.

From The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (2012, Dan Zahavi, ed.):
“Phenomenology shares the conviction that the critical stance proper to philosophy requires a move away from a straightforward metaphysical or empirical investigation of objects to an investigation of the very framework of meaning and intelligibility that makes any such straightforward investigation possible in the first place. It precisely asks how something like objectivity is possible in the first place.”

Our attempt is to partake in the discourse on the Phenomenology of Architecture by working and studying Architectural Phenomenology outside of the Conventions of Architecture. In theory, this can mean a free-thinking, and to some degree also a “free-making” and/or “free-looking”, yet in the realm of our studios it means the making of a dedicated Artistic Research which is looking for the Creation of a Material Practice in which the student can gain a certain expertise in and through which the discourse on the Phenomenology of Architecture can be tried on – if it not already is embodied by the material itself.

We aim at preparing and enabling students to conduct their own investigation into Architectural Phenomenology understood as a Research Creation; a working mode creating an inspired Material Practice “attuned to process rather than the communication of outputs or products”. We consider this to be the Artistic Parallel to both Traditional Scholarly Research and Common Architectural Design Practice.

Based on performativity and affordance theories, performance and performance studies, disability and neurodiversity studies as well as phenomenology and perception theories, the Body & Space Morphologies Studio Works investigate primal and/or pre-architectural material/processes/phenomena/conditions and develop or perform a series of experienced distinct objects that behave relational, that inspire imagination, that provide new knowledge, architectural interests and/or architectural identities.

Instead of mediating architecture through a thought process that works with abstraction, illustration and representation, and that is intentional and argumentative involving the use or development of concepts, ideas and strategies, our design process focuses on the acting, sensing and thinking with objects/environments/conditions, and the craft of our hands in the making of them.

Students individually study the performance of and with materials or environments of their choice. The studio emphasizes reiterated acting with a material body and gains experience and confidence in the making as a “becoming or being architecture”. Lectures, individual reviews and an extensive reading list enable the students to enter the discourse on the phenomenology in architecture on the base of their own material practice, and to furthermore collectively and critically reflect on theories and research related to perception, affordance, behavior, performativity and performance in architecture, objects and/or environments.

WORKING TOPICS FOR SPRING 2021:

The Body & Space Morphology Studio on Acting and The Collective offers students to place their working initatives for a research creation under one of the following topics:

Catharsis:  the necessity to do something because of a particular interest / inspiration / desire of yours. Satisfies your curiosity and releases a working process that brings you closer to that which you want to get to know better.

Land: the readiness to engage with an environment, source or ground from which you can draw affordance from. Relates your creation and material process to a body/ source/phenomena you connect it too.

House: the want to make a house (construction/unit/infrastructure/garden/beholder) you want or need to make. Releases the attempt to make that house and finds ways to make it based on your understanding of the "want" as a necessity that connects the work to something else.

Film: the confrontation with conditions and phenomena and the practice of looking at and forming content through recording and editing moving images and audo. Strengthens your awareness for existing alternative narratives in the way we see production and presentation of phenomena and conditions.

WORKING PLACES - AHO and THE LISTA FIELD STUDIO:

The Body & Space Morphology Studio on Acting and The Collective Spring 2021 offers its students two workplaces: our regular studio space at AHO and our LISTA Field Studio in Farsund, Southern Norway.

In collaboration with Farsund Commune, section for culture and sports, Stiv Kuling AS architects as well as private business and landowners, the Body & Space Morphologies teaching and research unit maintains the LISTA Field-Studio as an extension to the regular AHO Studio.

Throughout the semester, students of the Body & Space Morphologies studio are given the possibility to spend shorter or longer periods in Lista – or alternative; to spend the whole semester in Lista. The choice of working place is not made dependend on the chosen working topics, but we encourage students working the topic "Land" to onsider at least some of their studies to take place in the Lista environment.

Students choosing to work in the LISTA Field-Studio are given free accommodation, access to the land and personnel capacities as well as material recourses etc..

The aim with this initiative is threefold:
a) to provide students with the possibility to spend shorter or longer periods on the LISTA peninsula in order to draw from the affordance that resides in this particular multi-faceted cultural landscape.
b) through the individual works of the students to collect and show a growing body of artistic research that reflects on issues of - or that makes new subjects relative to – the Lista Peninsula.
c) to strengthen ongoing and/or to make new collaborations for the establishing of an International Interdisciplinary Research Creation project-proposal called The LISTA Project.

The Field-Studio in LISTA is run by the architects Jan Gunnar Skjeldsøy and Anders Eik Pilskog, Stiv Kuling AS, Farsund. Their atelier will serve as common place for discussions and the supervising of those students working in Lista. However, students choosing this option are entirely free to decide where and what to work with. The initiative for an artistic research – what it copes with and wants to try itself on - still remains the responsibility of the student.

Please contact the teaching body for more information on accommodation, working conditions and possibilities connected to the LISTA Field Studio.