| art.description.project | Architecture is shaped by circumstances: by necessity, accident, and economic and political conditions. Equally crucial to this shaping are the conventions that control the architectural process. The project Stage Directions takes as its starting point one of the most basic of these conventions, the orthographic drawing, and explores written instructions as an alternative architectural tool: Can stage directions function as building instructions? Can they convey desires and needs that drawings leave out? Can they encompass the temporality of the site from conception to demolition?
The architectural process is never neutral. The tool affects what is created. The drawing, the primary tool, plays a double role in architecture: in part it represents the ideal reality, in part it functions as a guide though the process of construction. The drawing depicts the ideal of the completed project through an orthographic description in which architecture is often portrayed as a series of autonomous objects frozen in time. The physical work, the conflicts, the life, and the decay that surround a construction remain invisible in the drawing.
Though a written instruction dictates and establishes conditions, it is also open to unforeseeable situations and solutions. The text allows for what is being experienced, both by the writer and the reader, and is thus both superior and inferior to the context. Text also has a temporal aspect that makes process central, that creates a redistribution of auteurship, and a continuous attentiveness to the usage of the building. This is not about idealizing the indeterminable; by exploring the tools, temporality, and possibilities of the architectural process, we wish to dismantle existing notions of what architecture, city, and public space are and focus on architecture as a dynamic process that continues beyond the drawing board and construction of a building.
The stage directions contain instructions for the construction and demolition of a waiting room in which the principle unit of measurement is time. The design is constructed by a builder whose interpretation of the stage directions plays a central role in the project. This is the project’s exploratory and empirical component, in which our vision is set against personal experiences and references, the rules and conventions of architecture and construction.
The idea is to use the instructions for the waiting room for a series of structures built in a variety of situations over the coming years. The building involves both the construction and demolition of the structure at a particular location, within a set period of time and within a particular economic framework. In other words, there are no restrictions or qualifications other than those specified in the instructions or determined by time, space, and budget. The context, in principle, can be anywhere people stay for any length of time: an entrance, a park, a town square, a bus station. Because interpretation and translation are central to the work, the text is also translated into the language the builder prefers to read.
By constructing a variety of interpretations, we investigate a full-scale model for an exploratory architecture that allows for change and subtle shifts in public life. Stage Directions / Waiting Room #3 was under construction from October 5 to October 29 as part of the EVA exhibition at Konstakademien in Stockholm. The structure was constructed and demolished within this timeframe. | sv |
