Responsive Tectonics: Adaptive Narratives in Design Studios

Introduction

The responsive formation-based methods used in design studios represent current contemporary approaches to design. This formation creates a new discussion with respect to new tectonics as these pertain to new technologies and new ways of production. Contemporary formation is motivated by process tools, which explore dimensional and situational as well as perceptual and visual changes. Nothing is constant and everything exhibits possibilities with respect to the creation of performative commons. In this chapter, the relationship between the environment and the human across the frameworks of organizational, morphological, and social spatial encounters is questioned according to the need for the production of responsive micro-tectonics with alternative prototypes. It also sets out to explore the techniques (models and methods) with which to re-think and re-design the brief of space-making.

Although space has some fixed aspects such as location, landscape and structure, if a space's behavior was entirely static it would hardly be capable of accommodating the range of contingencies that characterize daily life. The contingencies of daily life such as shifts in weather and the needs of people require a certain degree of flexibility, a capacity for adaptation and change. (Meagher, 2015). By introducing these contingencies of space, it is aimed to encourage students to be responsive. The term responsive as used here is related to the responsiveness of the students’ approach within the context of the process rather than the responsiveness elicited to the physical components of the space. This approach, by grasping the interaction between body and space, brings with it an adaptive setup in relation to different functions. In this respect, it is directly related to responsive materials and tectonics. So that responsiveness is used in a broader sense, one which encompasses all the social and physical aspects of space. It is used throughout the article to define both students and the process itself.

The responsive act is more than a form and creates a formation based on interactive configurations and narratives. The term of responsive production refers to a new form or approach to bodily space, one which is ordinary, but innovative, in its interactive character. In this study, unexpected forms of communication, socialization and spatial programming are seen as responsive acts of that space. As a result of these acts, each student tried to explore a responsive nesting interface in a specific content through synchronic design modules in the first-year design studio. This process tries to occupy a context to have the moments where the codes can flip, so that people have an escape hatch, a choice in relation to material, scale, pattern, and other unexpected dialogues. Conceptual network of responsiveness is indicated in Figure 1. The studio is an experimental area, which not only benefits from architectural knowledge, but also re-processes and transforms it and in doing so produces new architectural knowledge. It is a substantial undertaking to introduce architecture to first-year students not as a static phenomenon, but as a discipline of responsive space-making.

Figure 1.

Conceptual network of responsiveness

Learning by living is the main guidance in relation to the studio process. Making or doing things can no longer be seen as static, but should be seen as requiring additional possible interfaces within unexpected dialogues. Thus, learning-by-living is an outgrowth with nothing described as being either right or wrong. Process necessitates interactions, which, in many ways, are intersubjective. Site-visits, model-makings, writing narratives and all such techniques are not a part of the process, but rather the process can be regarded as the complex network of relationships between them.