Making is More - Construction’s Invisible Capacities for Making Architecture

Making is More - Construction’s Invisible Capacities for Making Architecture 

           In Making is More I interrogate and explore the concept of construction in architecture. It is a sense-making project, a search for what we talk about when we talk about construction, and a search for what is unthinkable and unusable, due to the prevailing conceptual framing. Hence the invisible mentioned in the title. The requirement to place construction as a concept under scrutiny, is determined by the consideration that the way we conceptualise things, defines how we attend to them. From this point of view, the project is philosophical rather than technological, notwithstanding the fact that in architecture, construction is mainly seen as a technological subject, the domain of knowledge that instrumentally addresses its realisation. The connections with technology are not cut, but the prevailing habits of thinking related to construction, as technological concept and practice, are questioned and criticised. This is necessary because these habits are marked and conditioned by two far reaching paradoxes, designated here as the ‘paradox of independence’ and the ‘paradox of form’. 

            The ‘paradox of independence’ refers to the dominance of logical and analytical thinking. If we assume a definition of construction as placing or organising things together, logic and analysis attempt to understand this ‘togethering’ by doing the opposite. The world is cut up in individualised entities, and construction is thought of in terms of parts both made abstract, and autonomous from one another and their contexts. What is left unsaid, is that in so doing, we lose something crucial, namely the together or the collective itself, with everything that this entails. 

            The ‘paradox of form’ refers to the diversion of attention away from construction process, and towards the two typical and emblematic extremities of that process: on the upstream side projected form, and formalised knowledge about; on the downstream side the physical and tangible outcome, the object as built form. The result is a bi-polar form-model, in which form is considered primordial, and process is subservient, meant to replicate one form into another. What is lost, is the process of becoming itself, with its generative dynamics, and the inter-actions at work in it. What is lost too, is a practice bound to situations and conditions, the necessity to adjust to them, the implications of interpretation and approximation, and more. In a nutshell, the vital interdependence of form and process becomes invisible, and remains unattended. 

            Within Making is More I reconnect the concept of construction with these so-called invisible things, and introduce another set of values: attention, empathy and care for the collective and the other acting in it; dynamic thinking and working; distributive agency, and the vital reciprocities between making and use, form and process, etc. My orientation is not oppositional, but one of enhancement and improvement. My ambition is to expand the concept of construction by complementing it, or making it more: more comprehensive; more intricate and complex; more sensitive for what happens in between things; more inclusive and more generous. I do not replace or abolish logic and analysis, nor do I kill form, but I associate them with the partners they need as equipoise. To achieve this, the concept of learning is added as well, alongside philosophy and technology, because of its inherent potential to open another path, that of seeing construction in terms of exploration and evolution. 

            Making is More is a kind of theory or philosophy of more. It came about through making, and by using the style of construction, or in other words, by putting the ways of doing construction, in a broad sense, into practice. Construction is used as a guiding principle, a speculative means, a method for both thinking and working or acting. Philosophy (and theory) is thought of as something that must be constructed from within processes and events, rather than from intellectual reflection at a distance. The outcome is the result of diverse and at times disparate practices of construction: writing stories; on site construction work at scale 1on1, both in architectural practice and in workshops with students; making drawings and maps; wandering in landscapes to look, be surprised, observe and describe carefully; the design and implementation of an introductory course in construction for starting students in architecture; etc. It is a map and an assemblage composed out of many heterogeneous parts, i.e. not one unified entity, not a program or a plan. It does not deal with practical problems and solutions for building, not with building science and construction methods or systems, nor with engineering. It does not aim at formulating instrumental solutions for architectural practice and profession. The aim is to think through a concept and what it affords, primarily in terms of sharing and interdependence, and not exclusively in terms of separation and autonomy. The reflective distance needed for this, is created by loosening the grip of the very demands and constraints of architectural profession and practice. 

            A basic premise of the research is that construction as a concept must be rethought and reworked, because its full scope and wide-ranging implications for architecture are not covered. And this is cause for concern, especially at times when a reconsideration of architecture’s wide-ranging implications for the world we inhabit, has become an unavoidable issue. Making is More is intended as a contribution to this, not necessarily by means of rational argument and proof, but by setting up a sensuous evocation of possible alternative connections and trajectories