The Sense of Architectural Constructs

In architecture science and art meet each other in the design process. In most architecturalpractices designing implements both scientific knowledge, gained from unified observationsof the world, and poetic knowledge gained from embodied experiences in the world.Architectural research has an established tradition in the development of scientificknowledge in the fields of technology, construction, history and theory. But other modes ofknowledge production remain relatively uncovered. The research presented here aims toarticulate the potential of the architectural construct towards poetic knowledge productionby blurring the distinction between intelligibility and sensibility and treating the ideal andthe material as one continuous heterogeneous field. It is in the liminal zones, the in-betweenthat things meet, interact, reverberate, where encounters take place, and we expect thearchitectural construct to position in the milieu to stage these encounters. The disruptiveencounter will be discussed as a specific type of sense making involving a co-developmentof theoretical perspectives and creative making processes. Poetic measuring will bepresented as a tactic for staging encounters, recently developed within the research groupRadical Materiality at the KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, campus Sint-Lucas Brussels