Architecture’s Provoking Instrumentality

Architecture’s Provoking Instrumentality investigates the potential of architecture as a trigger to thought. Through the embodying experience of architectural artefacts, the relation between people and world can be questioned, brought sensibly into negotiation. Negotiation as a materially installed process becomes the foundation of this research: it disturbs and resists established and prescribing ways of thinking and acting within the world, venturing from what is considered to be known to the realm of possibilities. Architecture thus conceived goes beyond narrow definitions of itself, beyond the aesthetic, the functional and the closed concept. Not being smooth, adaptive and affirmative, it is edgy, frictionous and critical. Not being problem-solving, it problematizes: architecture as a complicating machine enabeling us to think the world anew. The research is project driven: it ventures from conceived and built architectural experiments, inside and outside an educational context, to establish a broader critical questioning design attitude, inducing the dynamics of negotiation.status: publishe