Image of Irrationality [im-rra]

“Over the past few decades, architecture as an idea has limited its definition of itself. Architectural styles and forms are often the seductive packaging and repackaging of the same proven, marketable concepts. What is needed desperately today are approaches to architecture that can free its potential to transform our ways of thinking and acting.” - Lebbus Woods

To design anything, it is necessary to first imagine a client a site, a purpose, or even a world. It has to be made up. This speculative approach invites the use of fiction in architecture to widen the cultural discourse and explorations in architectural design. Architecture as spatial story telling. It has a unique capacity to uncover as well as tell stories. As a language it can negotiate the threshold between matter-of-fact, reality, and mysterious spatial events. This acknowledgement of the increasingly complex and accelerated world. Im-rra intents to investigate the potential of visionary architectural representations, aimed not to create buildings, but rather to progress the discussion and mediation of architecture beyond its own disciplinary boundaries through narrative and imagery. It offers alternatives to the autonomous presumptions of architecture and to create a field of unpredictable potentials.

Im-rra is a presence that springs from the notion of the fatal inevitability of change. This idea is created through the use of narrative and image making to introduce a parasite that is in constant evolution and decay of the built form. This allows a place where spaces are prevented from being complete and are in constant state of mutation, creating a vibrant relationship between parasite (alien object), host (building), and the immune system (the user). This sets a stage for an absolute freedom and alternative ways of attacking the autonomous architecture. Here I’m also taking about the disturbing power of the image. We are not to read it with reason, we are to read it with emotion.

"Conflict Space" by Lebbeus Woods. [Exibition at SFMOMA]