non-typological architecture
Research drawing of Mayan Cave Temple and Rituals by Georgia Kestekoglou
Thousands of Tiny Little Sexes
Torn, we hang on, but also yearn for something else entirely. Quarantine brought disorientation, confinement, isolation, drudgery and blur, but also a kind of liberation. Boundaries between times, activities and spaces such as home, office, school or gym have melted, flooding our kitchens, living rooms, floors, stairs, roofs, gardens, parks, bushes, benches, bridges and so on. We are increasingly obligated to adapt to uncertainty and emergency and to accept new rules, but also to get back to our routine of endless production. Yet a new, social ‘epidemic’ haunts the politics of control: refusal, apathy, nihilism, desire and criticality have been amplified by the pandemic’s suspension of our typical habits. Many are reassessing their values and forms of life; perhaps even finding moments of bliss in the absence of any horizon.
The pandemic was only an acceleration of the fact that older political instruments such as housing typologies – with their classes, sexes, interior programmatic divisions and values – are being rejected or exceeded by an intensifying flow of the same wild creative power that architects unearthed to invent them. New ‘invisible’ political instruments work to modulate life in increasingly open and soft space. Our singularity – the becoming of our thousands of tiny little sexes – is increasingly conjured up and set free, yet just as quickly re-ordered and captured. But make no mistake, the tyrannical gods, mythologies and machines of history have not been exceeded, but instead interweave with nanotech.
Increasing demands on our capacity to adapt, create and destroy have exposed and suspended our ‘capture’ in habits, environments, genetic coding and so on; revealing the fact that we are ‘inessential’ beings which lack any preordained work, ‘nature’ or destiny. This is precisely why we have the possibility of politics and architecture. Therefore, DIP19 is interested in pushing dissolution and ‘misuse’ much deeper. We are interested in opening up forms, myths and spectacles – things once typologised, plannified, separated, restricted and prescribed – to the possibility of new, free uses; to joyous experiments with the architecture of our reality and selves as an end in itself.
Tutors: Brendon Carlin, James Kwang-Ho Chung
