INEVITABLE RECONSTRUCTIONS

In this article, we describe our teaching practice as part of an interdisciplinary practice in order to accommodate a synergy between the description of objective propositions (i.e. conceived space) and the description of the ostensible (i.e. perceived space) in relation to an architecture practice where each project aims to address both historic and current aspects specific to the site. As architects in practice and education we aim at the observation of space as deeply rooted in a cultural and socio-political history, as such, we actively acknowledge what Henri Lefebvre describes as Social Space; a space that is ultimately experienced and not merely objectively observed [1]. The world we experience today is entrenched by an infiltrating and ever extending communication apparatus, surpassing travel and physical migration, giving birth to simultaneous attendance in a super-metropolis of multiple interlaced localities. With our teaching practice we aim at the deployment of an explorative platform in search of many specific yet coherent views of this metropolitan landscape and with it its history. As such, our work is not set in linear reference to a previous timeframe yet acknowledges history as a network of intersecting timelines. These intersecting timelines, suggest something resembling a fabric of history, a woven mesh, as opposed to a merely linear thread. This allows us to look at urban sites through multiple pasts still resonating in the present. An important output of this particular viewing of history is a mode of thinking where it becomes increasingly more difficult to think outside or after history and much more appealing to sustain within its mesh of time. This way, we are confronted with the study of history beyond the scholastic notion of objectivism and serial events. Instead we can look at histories; as simultaneous drifts [4] of story telling drafted by particular zeitgeists, constructed and deconstructed to appear seemingly galvanized. As educators, we need to allow for an unpicking, a re-evaluation and eventually a re-composition of what once appeared as ‘matters of fact’. To do so, we aim for a critical positioning, a ‘relative attitude towards history’ [2] by escaping a historical periphery in search for relevant points of intersection and overlap, particular to the site and the project at hand. The projects we discuss and describe in this paper address the city through the lens of place making, in search for relative authenticity. This involves a design attitude where an urban site is investigated as a place of intersecting social, historical, and technical trajectories. Projects thus address environments of ‘connective-ness’, where a multitude of indigenous and distant elements start to overlap and intersect in search for a site’s reciprocal identity and this mainly through the act of drawingstatus: publishe