The Sense of Architectural Constructs

Paper in proceeding, 2014

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