The Sense of Architectural Constructs
Paper i 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.
encounter
materiality
architectural constructs
sense making
poetics