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The different ‘places’ where one discusses or presents work, and the particular quality of the environment where these take place. These spatial metaphors range in character from being in-progress, pedagogical or informal to communicative, informational or archival.
The variety of media and formats in which research outputs can take shape, engaging different forms of communication, reaching particular audiences and accomplishing specific purposes.
The different ways in which one person ‘knows more than she can tell’ depending on the character and origin of the knowledge. These different forms of tacit knowing describe its specificity: pointing out whether something is implicit because it is unconscious, unrecognized, unsaid, uncodified etc.
The keywords, fields and concepts that situate the particular contributions of the network within broader literature and schools of thought.
The different phases and forms of dissemination that research and academic outputs can take, indicating the kind of publication, the progress of the work or the forum where they are presented.
The idioms that reflect the multinational character and vocalize the conversations of the TACK network and its outputs.
The members, contributors, facilitators, communities and organizations that build up, around and underneath the TACK Network and participate, in one way or another, in the endeavour of addressing the question of Tacit Knowledge in architecture.

50 Objects

Lecture / Talk

29th May 2000

Dove va la città dopo il coronavirus

© Domus
La pandemia di coronavirus ha messo a nudo questioni che erano già oggetto di riflessione con un’accelerazione senza precedenti. Per questo Domus propone di ragionare, ancora a caldo, su quale sia la città che vogliamo.
Claudia Mainardi
Lecture / Talk

29th May 2000

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Dove va la città dopo il coronavirus

Claudia Mainardi
© Domus
La pandemia di coronavirus ha messo a nudo questioni che erano già oggetto di riflessione con un’accelerazione senza precedenti. Per questo Domus propone di ragionare, ancora a caldo, su quale sia la città che vogliamo.
Newsletter

Report on the Intermediate Meeting at LUH, Hanover/Germany

Workshop Thursday #2
This is a report on the TACK 6th Intermediate meeting @LUH, written by Margitta Buchert and Sarah Wehmeyer.
Margitta Buchert Sarah Wehmeyer
Newsletter

October 13, 2022

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Report on the Intermediate Meeting at LUH, Hanover/Germany

Margitta Buchert Sarah Wehmeyer
Workshop Thursday #2
Workshop Friday #5
Workshop Thursday #3
This is a report on the TACK 6th Intermediate meeting @LUH, written by Margitta Buchert and Sarah Wehmeyer.
Journal Article

Architectural Ethnography? Incipits, distances, horizons for research and teaching practices

Figura 1 – profili degli abitanti e nuove tipologie di stanze (ReCoDe 2019), © Gennaro Postiglione
ABSTRACT
Architectural ethnography has increasingly been a focus of attention thanks to recent studies carried out by Albena Yaneva or to practices and research carried out by Momoyo Kaijima with her Atelier Bow Wow. Starting from an interest in the specificities of ethnographical approaches if practiced by architects, or by professionals and researchers having particular attention to forms, materiality and uses of the space in the everyday, this article outlines a literature review on ethnography for designers. This review has been helpful in defining through convergences and distances a specific positioning that we are assuming in teaching and doing research for design. A path that led to further questions on the role of transcription (graphical, photographic, textual) in architectural ethnography, as well as to challenging the role of tradition and innovation in this recent stream of research. 
Gennaro Postiglione Paola Briata
Journal Article

June 18, 2022

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Architectural Ethnography? Incipits, distances, horizons for research and teaching practices

Gennaro Postiglione Paola Briata
Figura 1 – profili degli abitanti e nuove tipologie di stanze (ReCoDe 2019), © Gennaro Postiglione
Figura 3 – La mostra finale di Gratosoglio Ground Zero (2019) , © Gennaro Postiglione
Figura 4 – La vita attorno agli oggetti (QLHL 2020), © Gennaro Postiglione
ABSTRACT
Architectural ethnography has increasingly been a focus of attention thanks to recent studies carried out by Albena Yaneva or to practices and research carried out by Momoyo Kaijima with her Atelier Bow Wow. Starting from an interest in the specificities of ethnographical approaches if practiced by architects, or by professionals and researchers having particular attention to forms, materiality and uses of the space in the everyday, this article outlines a literature review on ethnography for designers. This review has been helpful in defining through convergences and distances a specific positioning that we are assuming in teaching and doing research for design. A path that led to further questions on the role of transcription (graphical, photographic, textual) in architectural ethnography, as well as to challenging the role of tradition and innovation in this recent stream of research. 
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

Bed Chamber

Bed Chamber is a work from series Recreation Areas: 1:100 miniatures of islands that mimic or suggest a place. Recreation Areas are objects of power and models to believe. They are substitutes for places and non-places full of fantasy and memories. They can balance your life in turbulent times.
U5 Collective
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

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Bed Chamber

U5 Collective
© TACK
Bed Chamber is a work from series Recreation Areas: 1:100 miniatures of islands that mimic or suggest a place. Recreation Areas are objects of power and models to believe. They are substitutes for places and non-places full of fantasy and memories. They can balance your life in turbulent times.
Interview Video

THE POWER OF SILENT ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE

Tom Avermaete and Hamish Lonergan were interviewed by Gabrielle Attinger from the EU Grants Access in Zürich about their perspective on the TACK project.
Tom Avermaete Hamish Lonergan
Interview Video

March 1, 2022

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THE POWER OF SILENT ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE

Tom Avermaete Hamish Lonergan
Tom Avermaete and Hamish Lonergan were interviewed by Gabrielle Attinger from the EU Grants Access in Zürich about their perspective on the TACK project.
Book chapter TACK Book

Traveling Perspectives: Tracing ‘impressions’ of a project in Flanders

Fig. 6.2: Focus on the front façade of the BMCC. Photographed December 2022.
ABSTRACT
The collection of localities that play an active (and overlooked) or quiescent (yet potent) role in architectural practices are put in question here. The chapter investigates how a project and its site specific geographical setting can contain traces of broader architectural contexts. It asks how architectural collaborative approaches that stem from the encounter of different perspectives can be read in the lived environment through the lens of plurilocality. Distinct yet intermingling perspectives of a contemporary architectural realisation are drawn out through a dive into the meeting and convention centre in Bruges. This is a building designed by two offices based in different architectural environments — the Portuguese practice Souto de Moura Arquitectos alongside the Antwerp-based firm META architectuurbureau. Various perspectives of the same building are set in parallel, exploring place through similarities and differences. From different modes of apprehending the project, concepts of place and architectural intentions set in motion in this instance are unpacked, involving a transversal reading through a broader architectural community of practice. Active instances of getting to know a place through experience can thereby be tacit yet situated: they can be embodied, embedded and enacted. This further explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s hint of a depth found in the latent form of impressions, in their ‘caché-révélé’ or hidden-revealed. Expressions of such instances, through interpreting reflexive features of buildings that stem from plurilocal collaborations, become productive insights into the mechanisms of place relation, their transfers and interweaving, and their impact in architectural design practices. Most of all, these parcels of the tacit dimension of place interpretation are put forward as such: aggregates that interfere with- and feed a relation-full practice of living environments.
Caendia Wijnbelt
Book chapter TACK Book

November 1, 2022

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Traveling Perspectives: Tracing ‘impressions’ of a project in Flanders

Caendia Wijnbelt
Fig. 6.2: Focus on the front façade of the BMCC. Photographed December 2022.
Fig. 6.X: Analogue double exposures. The BMCC overlayed with the Beursplein neighbourhood, photographed December 2022.
Fig. 6.X: Double exposure;;;;
Fig. 6.5: View of the historical center of Bruges from the Belvedere of the BMCC, photographed February 2022.
Fig. 6.X: Analogue double exposures
Figure 6.X: BMCC, photographed February 2022
Fig. 6.9:
ABSTRACT
The collection of localities that play an active (and overlooked) or quiescent (yet potent) role in architectural practices are put in question here. The chapter investigates how a project and its site specific geographical setting can contain traces of broader architectural contexts. It asks how architectural collaborative approaches that stem from the encounter of different perspectives can be read in the lived environment through the lens of plurilocality. Distinct yet intermingling perspectives of a contemporary architectural realisation are drawn out through a dive into the meeting and convention centre in Bruges. This is a building designed by two offices based in different architectural environments — the Portuguese practice Souto de Moura Arquitectos alongside the Antwerp-based firm META architectuurbureau. Various perspectives of the same building are set in parallel, exploring place through similarities and differences. From different modes of apprehending the project, concepts of place and architectural intentions set in motion in this instance are unpacked, involving a transversal reading through a broader architectural community of practice. Active instances of getting to know a place through experience can thereby be tacit yet situated: they can be embodied, embedded and enacted. This further explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s hint of a depth found in the latent form of impressions, in their ‘caché-révélé’ or hidden-revealed. Expressions of such instances, through interpreting reflexive features of buildings that stem from plurilocal collaborations, become productive insights into the mechanisms of place relation, their transfers and interweaving, and their impact in architectural design practices. Most of all, these parcels of the tacit dimension of place interpretation are put forward as such: aggregates that interfere with- and feed a relation-full practice of living environments.
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

25 Objects of Belonging

‘Objects of belonging’ are found or ready-made objects that users adapt to redefine the conventional boundaries of a home. These objects’ tacit presence dissolves where the house begins and ends, blurring boundaries between urban and domestic spheres.
Samantha Ong Ariel Bintang
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

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25 Objects of Belonging

Samantha Ong Ariel Bintang
© TACK
‘Objects of belonging’ are found or ready-made objects that users adapt to redefine the conventional boundaries of a home. These objects’ tacit presence dissolves where the house begins and ends, blurring boundaries between urban and domestic spheres.
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

RE-enactment

In 2015 we exhibited our work in this gallery and made some spatial interventions, including coloured columns, such as this one. These interventions represented our way of thinking, reflecting, acting, and communicating. We believe that a RE-enactment of a part of this exhibition fits well within the TACK framework. We thus proposed to RE-instal a column.
Architecten Jan De Vylder Inge Vinck
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

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RE-enactment

Architecten Jan De Vylder Inge Vinck
© TACK
In 2015 we exhibited our work in this gallery and made some spatial interventions, including coloured columns, such as this one. These interventions represented our way of thinking, reflecting, acting, and communicating. We believe that a RE-enactment of a part of this exhibition fits well within the TACK framework. We thus proposed to RE-instal a column.
Online Teaching Module

Understanding Architectural Design Studios as ‘Communities of Tacit Knowledge’

© Hamish Lonergan
Hamish Lonergan Tom Avermaete ETH Zürich, Department of Architecture
Online Teaching Module

October 10, 2022

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Understanding Architectural Design Studios as ‘Communities of Tacit Knowledge’

Hamish Lonergan Tom Avermaete ETH Zürich, Department of Architecture
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
© Hamish Lonergan
Paper Session VECTORS TACK Conference Proceedings

History meets the Body. Re-enactment as a mode of architectural inquiry.

ABSTRACT
Although we normally think about ideas and discourses as disembodied entities, the truth is that tacit architectural concepts, specific ways of understanding history, time, and space, are inscribed into our built environments, and they can only be disentangled with the help of our own bodies, by performing actions within, in, and around buildings. This paper explores the use of re-enactments as a method for architectural historians, using Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s own house as a case study. The researcher’s body informs the reflections and findings, from materiality to meaning, through the continuous and embedded experience of the space, a seventeenth century building were the Van Eycks lived from 1965, which was diligently remodelled by themselves into their treasured family home. Almost hidden from the street hustle, yet open to the outside, the place lights up as soon as the threshold is crossed. Both literally and metaphorically, the changes and additions to the building reveal their architectural thinking and ways of inhabiting. In the house, layers of temporality, materiality, everyday living and lived experience mingle with design solutions and worldviews affecting them. However, while re-enactments allow for an embodied understanding of how architectural ideas take material form, they also hold the potential to show the situatedness, partiality and contingency of the re-enacted practices, questioning the same values that they unearth. keywords.
Alejandro Campos-Uribe Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
Paper Session VECTORS TACK Conference Proceedings

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History meets the Body. Re-enactment as a mode of architectural inquiry.

Alejandro Campos-Uribe Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
© TACK
ABSTRACT
Although we normally think about ideas and discourses as disembodied entities, the truth is that tacit architectural concepts, specific ways of understanding history, time, and space, are inscribed into our built environments, and they can only be disentangled with the help of our own bodies, by performing actions within, in, and around buildings. This paper explores the use of re-enactments as a method for architectural historians, using Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s own house as a case study. The researcher’s body informs the reflections and findings, from materiality to meaning, through the continuous and embedded experience of the space, a seventeenth century building were the Van Eycks lived from 1965, which was diligently remodelled by themselves into their treasured family home. Almost hidden from the street hustle, yet open to the outside, the place lights up as soon as the threshold is crossed. Both literally and metaphorically, the changes and additions to the building reveal their architectural thinking and ways of inhabiting. In the house, layers of temporality, materiality, everyday living and lived experience mingle with design solutions and worldviews affecting them. However, while re-enactments allow for an embodied understanding of how architectural ideas take material form, they also hold the potential to show the situatedness, partiality and contingency of the re-enacted practices, questioning the same values that they unearth. keywords.
Essay

Designing space through motion pictures

© Eva Sommeregger
Eva Sommeregger reflects on the winter semester 2013/14 at ABKW, where animation technology was used in the HTC design studio “Play Architecture” to design spatiality.
Eva Sommeregger
Essay

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Designing space through motion pictures

Eva Sommeregger
© Eva Sommeregger
Eva Sommeregger reflects on the winter semester 2013/14 at ABKW, where animation technology was used in the HTC design studio “Play Architecture” to design spatiality.
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

Carpenter Chair

© Sarah Vecchio
Carpenter Chair is an icon of construction and a eulogy to the exploration of the ordinary. It is a low, comfortable, and flexible lounge chair inspired by the aesthetics of the construction site.
Sarah Becchio Paolo Borghino
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

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Carpenter Chair

Sarah Becchio Paolo Borghino
© Sarah Vecchio
© TACK
Carpenter Chair is an icon of construction and a eulogy to the exploration of the ordinary. It is a low, comfortable, and flexible lounge chair inspired by the aesthetics of the construction site.
Paper Session VECTORS TACK Conference Proceedings

Rooms: Architectural Model-Making as Ethnographic Research

Fig. 1
ABSTRACT
Within design and architecture, scale models can create worlds of proposition, speculation and fiction. This paper situates the model as a tool for observation, documentation and engagement; a slow, durational method that manifests a deep participation in the lives of place and people marginalised by wider society. Rooms was an artistic and research project undertaken as part of the Urban Nation artistic residency in Berlin which looked at the Romanian immigrant community inhabiting the city, the spaces they occupy and appropriate, and the objects that they surround themselves with. These instances were drawn, surveyed, documented and then recreated through 1:20 paper models. Built to an extreme level of detail the models of everyday space visualise, offer new insight, and give a sense of value and recognition to the lived realities of individuals. A situated mode of research, this form of representation transforms the seemingly mundane into an object of beauty and atmosphere, encouraging access and participation from the participant, maker and the viewer. The inherently collaborative aspect of this process reveals the tacit, implicit knowledge present in everyday actions.
Ecaterina Stefanescu
Paper Session VECTORS TACK Conference Proceedings

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Rooms: Architectural Model-Making as Ethnographic Research

Ecaterina Stefanescu
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
ABSTRACT
Within design and architecture, scale models can create worlds of proposition, speculation and fiction. This paper situates the model as a tool for observation, documentation and engagement; a slow, durational method that manifests a deep participation in the lives of place and people marginalised by wider society. Rooms was an artistic and research project undertaken as part of the Urban Nation artistic residency in Berlin which looked at the Romanian immigrant community inhabiting the city, the spaces they occupy and appropriate, and the objects that they surround themselves with. These instances were drawn, surveyed, documented and then recreated through 1:20 paper models. Built to an extreme level of detail the models of everyday space visualise, offer new insight, and give a sense of value and recognition to the lived realities of individuals. A situated mode of research, this form of representation transforms the seemingly mundane into an object of beauty and atmosphere, encouraging access and participation from the participant, maker and the viewer. The inherently collaborative aspect of this process reveals the tacit, implicit knowledge present in everyday actions.
Exhibition Image TACK Exhibition Object

Heinrich Helfenstein’s Photography

Peter Märkli, two single-family houses in Azmoos, photos from 2002. © gta Archives / ETH Zurich, Heinrich Helfenstein, © gta Archive
Swiss architectural photographer Heinrich Helfenstein (1946-2020) trained as a linguist, his approach shaped by semiology and post-structuralism.
Irina Davidovici Ziu Bruckmann
Exhibition Image TACK Exhibition Object

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Heinrich Helfenstein’s Photography

Irina Davidovici Ziu Bruckmann
Peter Märkli, two single-family houses in Azmoos, photos from 2002. © gta Archives / ETH Zurich, Heinrich Helfenstein, © gta Archive
© TACK
Swiss architectural photographer Heinrich Helfenstein (1946-2020) trained as a linguist, his approach shaped by semiology and post-structuralism.
Conference Paper Paper

POSTHUMANIST SANDBOX: THE POTENTIAL OF MULTIPLAYER – ENVIRONMENTS

ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to reveal a novel assessment of creative production in academic education, re-evaluating the conceptual and artistic potential of virtual real-time collaboration through digital media. Allowing for transcultural exchange as well as global participation, this could positively influence the development of novel artistic approaches and innovative measures for universities by contributing to a more contemporary, location-independent, and ultimately more equal form of art and knowledge production.
Eva Sommeregger Valerie Messini
Conference Paper Paper

November 4, 2021

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POSTHUMANIST SANDBOX: THE POTENTIAL OF MULTIPLAYER – ENVIRONMENTS

Eva Sommeregger Valerie Messini
© Eva Sommeregger
ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to reveal a novel assessment of creative production in academic education, re-evaluating the conceptual and artistic potential of virtual real-time collaboration through digital media. Allowing for transcultural exchange as well as global participation, this could positively influence the development of novel artistic approaches and innovative measures for universities by contributing to a more contemporary, location-independent, and ultimately more equal form of art and knowledge production.
Presentation TACK Exhibition Object

Infra-thin Magick

The performative extended reality model "Infra-thin Magick" allows you to experience how such insights can be purposefully evoked by displacing and reassembling the components constituting your multimodal and synaesthetic spatial perception. It invites you to co-create embodied spatiality through active participation and play.
Paula Strunden
Presentation TACK Exhibition Object

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Infra-thin Magick

Paula Strunden
© TACK
The performative extended reality model "Infra-thin Magick" allows you to experience how such insights can be purposefully evoked by displacing and reassembling the components constituting your multimodal and synaesthetic spatial perception. It invites you to co-create embodied spatiality through active participation and play.
Book chapter TACK Book

Latent Continuities: Architectural knowledge and the heuristic tension of Indwelling

ABSTRACT
In his theory of Tacit Knowledge Michael Polanyi introduced the concept of Indwelling, to explain the role of habit and skill in practice-based knowledge, but also to describe a heuristic tension that underlies all forms of knowing. Such a tension, Polanyi tells us, unfolds from the ‘depths’ of our biological being to the ‘heights’ of ideas and cultural values. The premise of this essay is that the spatial (and temporal) metaphor of Indwelling is hardly an accident: human consciousness is opened to knowledge primarily through our physical engagement with the world, marked by both space and time. The hypothesis is thus formed of architecture as a discipline studying precisely such tacit processes of (In)dwelling, in search of correspondences between ‘thick’ levels of bodily disposition and ‘thinner’ levels of intellect and imagination. To pursue this hypothesis, I turn to the example of a two-month apprenticeship in traditional stonemasonry, that took place in 2019 in Greece, entailing the reconstruction of a particular type of dry-stone cobbled pathway, called kalderimi.
Ionas Sklavounos
Book chapter TACK Book

November 1, 2022

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Latent Continuities: Architectural knowledge and the heuristic tension of Indwelling

Ionas Sklavounos
ABSTRACT
In his theory of Tacit Knowledge Michael Polanyi introduced the concept of Indwelling, to explain the role of habit and skill in practice-based knowledge, but also to describe a heuristic tension that underlies all forms of knowing. Such a tension, Polanyi tells us, unfolds from the ‘depths’ of our biological being to the ‘heights’ of ideas and cultural values. The premise of this essay is that the spatial (and temporal) metaphor of Indwelling is hardly an accident: human consciousness is opened to knowledge primarily through our physical engagement with the world, marked by both space and time. The hypothesis is thus formed of architecture as a discipline studying precisely such tacit processes of (In)dwelling, in search of correspondences between ‘thick’ levels of bodily disposition and ‘thinner’ levels of intellect and imagination. To pursue this hypothesis, I turn to the example of a two-month apprenticeship in traditional stonemasonry, that took place in 2019 in Greece, entailing the reconstruction of a particular type of dry-stone cobbled pathway, called kalderimi.
Paper Session NATURE(S) TACK Conference Proceedings

UNCOMMONING: ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE

Fig. 1_Marcel Duchamp_Fontaine 1917 Title: Marcel Duchamp (R. Mutt), Fontaine, 1917 Credit: Alfred Stieglitz, artist: Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Creator: H. P. Roché, Public Domain CC0 1.0
ABSTRACT
While art and architecture share many characteristics, artistic knowledge offers some specific possibilities for contemporary architectural practice. Based on a theoretical framework around the artistic tacit knowing and with a focus on artistic reflexivity and its potential for knowledge production, the article explores artistic knowledge examples in the work of the Chilean architect Smiljan Radić. They mainly occur in accompanying practices like writing, collecting or photographing, but which are intertwined with and have an effect on the built. A light is shed on the imaginative, critical and transformative potentials of the artistic knowledge. These potentials especially come to play regarding the complexity of contemporary and future challenges for architecture. An outlook uses the example of the Spanish office Ensamble Studio to raise approaches to action and thought for potential future architectural practice. The specific potential of art and artistic knowledge to address complex problems through focused, reflexive, contextual thinking is highlighted as a way to overcome the known and inadequate – here: uncommoning.
Valerie Hoberg
Paper Session NATURE(S) TACK Conference Proceedings

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UNCOMMONING: ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE IN ARCHITECTURE

Valerie Hoberg
Fig. 1_Marcel Duchamp_Fontaine 1917 Title: Marcel Duchamp (R. Mutt), Fontaine, 1917 Credit: Alfred Stieglitz, artist: Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Creator: H. P. Roché, Public Domain CC0 1.0
Fig. 2_Smiljan Radić_Folly London 2014 Title: Marcel Duchamp (R. Mutt), Fontaine, 1917 Image Credit: © Images George Rex, „Serpentine Pavilion 2014 / I”, colours changed by the author, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode, (https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/14325677738/in/photolist-nPUQTL-8Nt32E-nQ4Nkn-oo16Pr-AaRKVU-o7ggJK-nQ5pnL-o7ros7-o7gfGV-o7g83X-nQ532m-o7yvVR-o7rnAN-nQ5k5C-nQsYXj-o7sNWJ-nQ5k6F-o9kEgv-d9KJ3k-2dvDbQm-nQ5bE1-nQ54j1-o7sLuE-d9KHyK-d9KHvA-nQ4RmU-d9KG5B-d9KGJC-8B6Ftp-d9KF3P-d9KER7-qnV5d7-2cuaupw-2cuauhh-2cuauwL-2aPygS9-2ccrV1M-2dvDfHm-2dvDfqN-zUshZy-2aPyh53-2dvDeKu-2aPygoy-2ccrUDV-2cuatXQ-2aPyg8o-2cuau6W-2ccrUuX-2ccrUR8-2aPyfRb)
Fig. 3_ Smiljan Radić_NAVE Santiago de Chile 2014 Title: Smiljan Radić, NAVE, Santiago de Chile 2014 Image Credit: architecture: Smiljan Radić, photo: Valerie Hoberg
ABSTRACT
While art and architecture share many characteristics, artistic knowledge offers some specific possibilities for contemporary architectural practice. Based on a theoretical framework around the artistic tacit knowing and with a focus on artistic reflexivity and its potential for knowledge production, the article explores artistic knowledge examples in the work of the Chilean architect Smiljan Radić. They mainly occur in accompanying practices like writing, collecting or photographing, but which are intertwined with and have an effect on the built. A light is shed on the imaginative, critical and transformative potentials of the artistic knowledge. These potentials especially come to play regarding the complexity of contemporary and future challenges for architecture. An outlook uses the example of the Spanish office Ensamble Studio to raise approaches to action and thought for potential future architectural practice. The specific potential of art and artistic knowledge to address complex problems through focused, reflexive, contextual thinking is highlighted as a way to overcome the known and inadequate – here: uncommoning.
Paper Session NATURE(S) TACK Conference Proceedings

BODY OF KNOWLEDGE : KNOWING BODIES

Fig. 1. Sofia Pintzou, contribution to »Sasha Waltz & Guests’ Tanztagebuch«, 2020, interpreting choreographic material from Sasha Waltz’ »noBody«, first performed 2002 at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, film stills from the video, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj-dVgonIT0, accessed July 25, 2023.
ABSTRACT
This contribution addresses tacit knowledge as an embodied form of knowing and traces the potential of the body to inform and explore, contain and convey, obtain and express architectural knowledge — in the experiencing, designing, creating, and living of architectural space. If, as framed by Polanyi, »we know more than we can tell«, focusing on the body and its immanent knowledge allows to access immediate forms of architectural knowledge. Experience, memory, and the capacity for anticipation are equally rooted in the body; corporeally anchored, contained in, and inscribed to the body. Respectively, creative imagination in architectural design relies upon the body. Through knowing how we experience architecture, we are eager to anticipate future perception in architectural design. Following my doctoral thesis, entitled “Impulses and Dialogues of Architecture and the Body”, I present the knowledge of the body as a contribution to the body of knowledge of architecture: Using the example of the working method and oeuvre of Sasha Waltz & Guests – which I investigate against the background of my own artistic practice, especially in in-situ and site-specific performances, as well as my attempts at the including of somatic practices into my academic teaching in the field of architecture – I exploit the body as a medium of spatial research, and as an immediate form of conveyance and expression in the discipline of architecture.
Katharina Voigt
Paper Session NATURE(S) TACK Conference Proceedings

July 20, 2023

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BODY OF KNOWLEDGE : KNOWING BODIES

Katharina Voigt
Fig. 1. Sofia Pintzou, contribution to »Sasha Waltz & Guests’ Tanztagebuch«, 2020, interpreting choreographic material from Sasha Waltz’ »noBody«, first performed 2002 at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, film stills from the video, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj-dVgonIT0, accessed July 25, 2023.
Fig. 2. Antonia Krabusch: Embodied Gestures, Gesture of Intimacy (left) and Gesture of Public (right), initial task for the design studio “Tanzhaus München – ein Ort für zeitgenössischen Tanz”, general masters’ thesis, winter 2021/22, Chair of Architectural Design and Conception, supervised by Katharina Voigt and Prof. Uta Graff.
Fig. 3. Lukas Walcher: Embodied Gestures, Gesture of Intimacy (left) and Gesture of Public (right), initial task for the design studio “Tanzhaus München – ein Ort für zeitgenössischen Tanz”, general masters’ thesis, winter 2021/22, Chair of Architectural Design and Conception, supervised by Katharina Voigt and Prof. Uta Graff.
ABSTRACT
This contribution addresses tacit knowledge as an embodied form of knowing and traces the potential of the body to inform and explore, contain and convey, obtain and express architectural knowledge — in the experiencing, designing, creating, and living of architectural space. If, as framed by Polanyi, »we know more than we can tell«, focusing on the body and its immanent knowledge allows to access immediate forms of architectural knowledge. Experience, memory, and the capacity for anticipation are equally rooted in the body; corporeally anchored, contained in, and inscribed to the body. Respectively, creative imagination in architectural design relies upon the body. Through knowing how we experience architecture, we are eager to anticipate future perception in architectural design. Following my doctoral thesis, entitled “Impulses and Dialogues of Architecture and the Body”, I present the knowledge of the body as a contribution to the body of knowledge of architecture: Using the example of the working method and oeuvre of Sasha Waltz & Guests – which I investigate against the background of my own artistic practice, especially in in-situ and site-specific performances, as well as my attempts at the including of somatic practices into my academic teaching in the field of architecture – I exploit the body as a medium of spatial research, and as an immediate form of conveyance and expression in the discipline of architecture.
Drawing Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

Ink Blot Drawings

Drawings, tracings, automatic drawings, ink blots like Rorschach have no logical connection to architecture.   Yet they offer a base from which research into the possibility of architecture can start. Could they be used as a plan for the building? If so, which parts? What might be the size of this work in relationship to the building? Etc.
Anne Holtrop
Drawing Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

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Ink Blot Drawings

Anne Holtrop
© TACK
Drawings, tracings, automatic drawings, ink blots like Rorschach have no logical connection to architecture.   Yet they offer a base from which research into the possibility of architecture can start. Could they be used as a plan for the building? If so, which parts? What might be the size of this work in relationship to the building? Etc.
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

The B-Sides. Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft

This book exhibits the B-sides of my dissertation – ideas that were cut from the final version but that have nonetheless proven promising. Dealing with post-digital forms of navigation, it juxtaposes the stories of Polynesian navigator Tupaia, Ancient Greek Kybernetes and Lara Croft’s avatar.
Eva Sommeregger
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

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The B-Sides. Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft

Eva Sommeregger
© TACK
This book exhibits the B-sides of my dissertation – ideas that were cut from the final version but that have nonetheless proven promising. Dealing with post-digital forms of navigation, it juxtaposes the stories of Polynesian navigator Tupaia, Ancient Greek Kybernetes and Lara Croft’s avatar.
Paper Session NATURE(S) TACK Conference Proceedings

Busy body – Living and working in urban renewal neighbourhoods 

Littie Diederen and Yvonne van den Elsen, Zoiets Maak Je Toch Niet, Ik Zeg Altijd, Dat Doen Mannen... Ervaringen van Vrouwen in de Stadsvernieuwing (Amsterdam: NCDB, 1983).
ABSTRACT
Urban renewal reinforces the isolation of working-class women. This was concluded in the 1983 publication “Zoiets maak je toch niet, ik zeg altijd, dat doen mannen…”. This booklet criticizes 1980s participatory urban renewal of the Staatsliedenbuurt in Amsterdam and addresses the exclusion of women. Several inventive tools were developed in this neighbourhood to empower women to make their diverse, tacit, embodied knowledge heard and make design suggestions that better fitted their needs. As a result, new knowledge was brought into participatory urban renewal processes of which women were so often excluded; diversifying and expanding what was commonly perceived as the concerns of the resident. This paper brings forward various tools developed in the Staatsliedenbuurt that were used as vehicles to bring women’s voices into urban renewal processes, such as the fictiocritical character Els, a workshop on dwelling stories, and a manual. The paper contributes to histories on the collective efforts by various women’s groups in the 1980s that fought exclusion and sought to develop feminist approaches for urban design by making what is the tacitly known, explicit; making the invisible, visible.
Soscha Monteiro de Jesus
Paper Session NATURE(S) TACK Conference Proceedings

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Busy body – Living and working in urban renewal neighbourhoods 

Soscha Monteiro de Jesus
Littie Diederen and Yvonne van den Elsen, Zoiets Maak Je Toch Niet, Ik Zeg Altijd, Dat Doen Mannen... Ervaringen van Vrouwen in de Stadsvernieuwing (Amsterdam: NCDB, 1983).
ABSTRACT
Urban renewal reinforces the isolation of working-class women. This was concluded in the 1983 publication “Zoiets maak je toch niet, ik zeg altijd, dat doen mannen…”. This booklet criticizes 1980s participatory urban renewal of the Staatsliedenbuurt in Amsterdam and addresses the exclusion of women. Several inventive tools were developed in this neighbourhood to empower women to make their diverse, tacit, embodied knowledge heard and make design suggestions that better fitted their needs. As a result, new knowledge was brought into participatory urban renewal processes of which women were so often excluded; diversifying and expanding what was commonly perceived as the concerns of the resident. This paper brings forward various tools developed in the Staatsliedenbuurt that were used as vehicles to bring women’s voices into urban renewal processes, such as the fictiocritical character Els, a workshop on dwelling stories, and a manual. The paper contributes to histories on the collective efforts by various women’s groups in the 1980s that fought exclusion and sought to develop feminist approaches for urban design by making what is the tacitly known, explicit; making the invisible, visible.
Review

Book Corner: “Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research” by Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, Deborah Van der Plaat (2019)

© Janina Gosseye
This book is a collection of twelve essays by an international group of scholars which deals with various research methods of oral history and the question of who has been unheard. The book critiques that architectural history contains mostly the main architect’s view as well as addresses only a particular group of intellectuals. Therefore the individual narratives within an on-going relational process should be decentralized by having an 'integrative dialogue with actors'
Mara Trübenbach Claudia Mainardi
Review

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Book Corner: “Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research” by Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, Deborah Van der Plaat (2019)

Mara Trübenbach Claudia Mainardi
© Janina Gosseye
This book is a collection of twelve essays by an international group of scholars which deals with various research methods of oral history and the question of who has been unheard. The book critiques that architectural history contains mostly the main architect’s view as well as addresses only a particular group of intellectuals. Therefore the individual narratives within an on-going relational process should be decentralized by having an 'integrative dialogue with actors'
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

Tactiles

Tactiles are relational objects that foster interactive approaches of un-learning restrictive spatial codes, re-learning through encounters of intimacy, embodiment and connectedness, and co-learning through shared performative experiences.
Katharina Kasinger
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

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Tactiles

Katharina Kasinger
© TACK
Tactiles are relational objects that foster interactive approaches of un-learning restrictive spatial codes, re-learning through encounters of intimacy, embodiment and connectedness, and co-learning through shared performative experiences.
Drawing Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

Ulrich Mahler’s Exkursionszettel Wagbachniederung

Ulrich Mahler’s Exkursionszettel exemplifies the importance of embodied tacit knowledge in the management of constructed landscapes.
Johanna Just
Drawing Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

May 29, 2022

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Ulrich Mahler’s Exkursionszettel Wagbachniederung

Johanna Just
© TACK
Ulrich Mahler’s Exkursionszettel exemplifies the importance of embodied tacit knowledge in the management of constructed landscapes.
Book chapter TACK Book

Exploring Spatial Perception through Performative 1:1 Extended Reality Models: Preliminary insights from Infra-thin Magick

© TACK
ABSTRACT
Building on scenography, performance theory and findings from neurosciences, tacit knowing in architecture is understood here as embodied, embedded and enacted perceptual dimension of our built environment. Through art- and design-based research, tacitly knowing is examined as a form of practice and a new extended reality (XR) design tool is probed to exercise it. Since the atmospheric turn in architecture (Böhme 2017, McCormack 2014, Bille et al. 2015), it is well known that spatial perception is multi-sensory and that the interplay of our senses goes beyond the cross-fertilization of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. Nevertheless, architectural designers may have only touched the surface of what we might be able to feel regarding our spatial environments. Apart from the sensation of our movement and whether our environment is too hot or cold, our abilities to feel space physically remain challenging to represent and communicate through conventional architectural tools. This includes i.e. our sense of balance, our ability to feel time passing, our knowledge of which of our body parts are where without having to look at them, and our sense of gravity, orientation, and illumination. Some of these “always-there-but-never-felt” sensations can be revealed and physically experienced when entering a fully immersive virtual environment for the first time. As our brain takes a split second to adjust to the novel surroundings, it is at this moment that we can suddenly sense our senses at work. The XR case study “Infra-thin Magick”, exhibited as part of Speculative Fiction at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2022, explains how such unanticipated insights can be purposefully evoked by displacing and reassembling the components constituting our multimodal and synaesthetic spatial perception. Leaning on the design theoretician Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallan’s understanding of the “autonomous model”, this performative real-time and -scale XR model that oscillates between physical installation and virtual reality (VR) experience is employed as an operative tool for designing and analyzing spatial experiences beyond the known sensations of our built environment. First user-testing results are presented, and the premise of the autonomous model to co-create reality and allow architects to research through active participation, first-hand experience, discovery, and play are brought to light.
Paula Strunden
Book chapter TACK Book

November 1, 2022

View

Exploring Spatial Perception through Performative 1:1 Extended Reality Models: Preliminary insights from Infra-thin Magick

Paula Strunden
© TACK
ABSTRACT
Building on scenography, performance theory and findings from neurosciences, tacit knowing in architecture is understood here as embodied, embedded and enacted perceptual dimension of our built environment. Through art- and design-based research, tacitly knowing is examined as a form of practice and a new extended reality (XR) design tool is probed to exercise it. Since the atmospheric turn in architecture (Böhme 2017, McCormack 2014, Bille et al. 2015), it is well known that spatial perception is multi-sensory and that the interplay of our senses goes beyond the cross-fertilization of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. Nevertheless, architectural designers may have only touched the surface of what we might be able to feel regarding our spatial environments. Apart from the sensation of our movement and whether our environment is too hot or cold, our abilities to feel space physically remain challenging to represent and communicate through conventional architectural tools. This includes i.e. our sense of balance, our ability to feel time passing, our knowledge of which of our body parts are where without having to look at them, and our sense of gravity, orientation, and illumination. Some of these “always-there-but-never-felt” sensations can be revealed and physically experienced when entering a fully immersive virtual environment for the first time. As our brain takes a split second to adjust to the novel surroundings, it is at this moment that we can suddenly sense our senses at work. The XR case study “Infra-thin Magick”, exhibited as part of Speculative Fiction at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2022, explains how such unanticipated insights can be purposefully evoked by displacing and reassembling the components constituting our multimodal and synaesthetic spatial perception. Leaning on the design theoretician Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallan’s understanding of the “autonomous model”, this performative real-time and -scale XR model that oscillates between physical installation and virtual reality (VR) experience is employed as an operative tool for designing and analyzing spatial experiences beyond the known sensations of our built environment. First user-testing results are presented, and the premise of the autonomous model to co-create reality and allow architects to research through active participation, first-hand experience, discovery, and play are brought to light.
Conference Paper Open Access Publication Paper

Urban Predation: The symbolic economy of the Pixo

Image 02: Denilson Baniwa Yawareté Mural Artist: Denilson Baniwa Photo: Rafaela Campos Alves , © Creative Commons
ABSTRACT
This essay proposes an analysis using the “symbolic economy of predation” to provide new perspectives on the question of pixo. For this, pixo will be considered as any act on walls, building facades, asphalt or monuments rejecting the hierarchical separations between writing, scribbling, painting or graffiti imposed by the art system and other institutions. In Amerindian ontology, as Viveiros de Castro describes, the feeding regime is the predominant model upon which relations are perceived. The predator and prey duality stands as the archetypical role ruling interactions between different subjectivities and perspectives. This “symbolic economy” permeates social relations and translates them into a particular epistemology shared by many indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon region. We aim to consider the relationships between those who practice pixo and the city through an analogy with the predator and prey dialectic. We argue that, on the one hand, these taggers get symbolical dominion over the city’s territory by marking places with their signatures, thus gaining recognition from their peers; on the other, the city - represented by formal governmental and economic institutions - preys upon taggers by criminalizing their practice as vandalism and by socioeconomically excluding peripheral populations, thus denying their access and right to the city itself. Pixo is a reaction to the passive role imposed on society that gains critical and artistic qualities as a practice of protest, endorsing its predatory performance. This analogy intents provide a new perspective to describe the city and its complex relations with the aesthetical and social realities of its inhabitants. A distinct description of the urban relations that might enable planners and policymakers to evaluate socio-political phenomena within the city through a new set of lenses, allowing the development of innovative approaches to tackle and decriminalize conflictual practices as the pixo.
Eric Crevels Alice Queiroz
Conference Paper Open Access Publication Paper

March 25, 2021

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Urban Predation: The symbolic economy of the Pixo

Eric Crevels Alice Queiroz
Image 02: Denilson Baniwa Yawareté Mural Artist: Denilson Baniwa Photo: Rafaela Campos Alves , © Creative Commons
Image 03: Topo Museu de Artes e Ofícios e Artes nos Edifícios no Centro de Belo Horizonte Photo: Magno Dias, © Creative Commons
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Metafísicas Canibais: Elementos para uma antropologia pós-estrutural”. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2015
ABSTRACT
This essay proposes an analysis using the “symbolic economy of predation” to provide new perspectives on the question of pixo. For this, pixo will be considered as any act on walls, building facades, asphalt or monuments rejecting the hierarchical separations between writing, scribbling, painting or graffiti imposed by the art system and other institutions. In Amerindian ontology, as Viveiros de Castro describes, the feeding regime is the predominant model upon which relations are perceived. The predator and prey duality stands as the archetypical role ruling interactions between different subjectivities and perspectives. This “symbolic economy” permeates social relations and translates them into a particular epistemology shared by many indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon region. We aim to consider the relationships between those who practice pixo and the city through an analogy with the predator and prey dialectic. We argue that, on the one hand, these taggers get symbolical dominion over the city’s territory by marking places with their signatures, thus gaining recognition from their peers; on the other, the city - represented by formal governmental and economic institutions - preys upon taggers by criminalizing their practice as vandalism and by socioeconomically excluding peripheral populations, thus denying their access and right to the city itself. Pixo is a reaction to the passive role imposed on society that gains critical and artistic qualities as a practice of protest, endorsing its predatory performance. This analogy intents provide a new perspective to describe the city and its complex relations with the aesthetical and social realities of its inhabitants. A distinct description of the urban relations that might enable planners and policymakers to evaluate socio-political phenomena within the city through a new set of lenses, allowing the development of innovative approaches to tackle and decriminalize conflictual practices as the pixo.
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

Material Chariots

Material references play a vital role in the collaborative work of architects. At the office of De Smet Vermeulen architects in Ghent, chariots are used to expose samples of materials and combine them into palettes.
Paul Vermeulen De Smet Vermeulen architecten
Exhibition TACK Exhibition Object

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Material Chariots

Paul Vermeulen De Smet Vermeulen architecten
© TACK
Material references play a vital role in the collaborative work of architects. At the office of De Smet Vermeulen architects in Ghent, chariots are used to expose samples of materials and combine them into palettes.
Online Teaching Module

Bridging architectural knowledge and lived experience through apprenticeship

© Ionas Sklavounos
Ionas Sklavounos Lara Schrijver University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences, Department of Architecture
Online Teaching Module

March 23, 2023

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Bridging architectural knowledge and lived experience through apprenticeship

Ionas Sklavounos Lara Schrijver University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences, Department of Architecture
© Ionas Sklavounos
© Ionas Sklavounos
© Ionas Sklavounos
© Ionas Sklavounos
© Ionas Sklavounos
Essay

Performing Space Through Photography

AA394585 cucina 314 420 300 3703 4961 RGB
Photography used as a tool within the architectural design process has been little studied so far. Yet, since photography implies a discourse in itself, it may turn out as being far more than a tool. By comparing two major examples the essay wants to show how the use of photography allows architects to rather perform their design ideas than merely represent them, and how the traditional architectural discourse –in particular modernism vs. postmodernism– becomes challenged. On the one hand there is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who pasted various photographs from newspapers and magazines in his design drawings furnishing them with an extraordinary modern atmosphere. But, as a consequence, the inherent dislocation of space and time shifts slightly the whole collage into what almost might be called a postmodern simulacrum. On the other hand there is Paolo Portoghesi who always wanted to overcome modernism’s ignorance towards architecture’s past. Despite the fact that photography has been considered as the modernist way of seeing the world, he exemplified this position by publishing a series of books on baroque architecture in Italy, equipped with compelling photographs taken by himself. They carry the reader off into the rich and tempting world of Roman baroque applying all available means of modernist photographic techniques and tricks. It will be shown that the modernist Mies and the postmodernist Portoghesi use similar visual material and techniques, but the way their photographic techniques are embedded in the broader visual discourse shifts their meaning from “seeing photographically” to the “photographic gaze”.
Angelika Schnell
Essay

View

Performing Space Through Photography

Angelika Schnell
AA394585 cucina 314 420 300 3703 4961 RGB
Photography used as a tool within the architectural design process has been little studied so far. Yet, since photography implies a discourse in itself, it may turn out as being far more than a tool. By comparing two major examples the essay wants to show how the use of photography allows architects to rather perform their design ideas than merely represent them, and how the traditional architectural discourse –in particular modernism vs. postmodernism– becomes challenged. On the one hand there is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who pasted various photographs from newspapers and magazines in his design drawings furnishing them with an extraordinary modern atmosphere. But, as a consequence, the inherent dislocation of space and time shifts slightly the whole collage into what almost might be called a postmodern simulacrum. On the other hand there is Paolo Portoghesi who always wanted to overcome modernism’s ignorance towards architecture’s past. Despite the fact that photography has been considered as the modernist way of seeing the world, he exemplified this position by publishing a series of books on baroque architecture in Italy, equipped with compelling photographs taken by himself. They carry the reader off into the rich and tempting world of Roman baroque applying all available means of modernist photographic techniques and tricks. It will be shown that the modernist Mies and the postmodernist Portoghesi use similar visual material and techniques, but the way their photographic techniques are embedded in the broader visual discourse shifts their meaning from “seeing photographically” to the “photographic gaze”.
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

Clay Landscape

This 1:1000 landscape model made from clay shows the site of a prominent 12th century church and graveyard located between two housing areas, Tensta and Rinkeby, built during the 1960´s as part of the Million Programme in Stockholm, where we are currently adding a wall of housing combined with an assembly hall, 100 metres long. In our practice we have used this kind of clay model for numerous projects over the years.
Ola Broms Wessel Klas Ruin Spridd
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

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Clay Landscape

Ola Broms Wessel Klas Ruin Spridd
© TACK
This 1:1000 landscape model made from clay shows the site of a prominent 12th century church and graveyard located between two housing areas, Tensta and Rinkeby, built during the 1960´s as part of the Million Programme in Stockholm, where we are currently adding a wall of housing combined with an assembly hall, 100 metres long. In our practice we have used this kind of clay model for numerous projects over the years.
Book chapter Open Access Publication

2021

Teaching Design in a Post-Rainbow Nation A South African Reflection on the Limits and Opportunities of Design Praxis

Example co-developed code of engagement (Author 2017), © Jhono Bennett
ABSTRACT
There has been an intense discourse on the relationship between inter-stakeholder university engagements, or service learning, and the broader society that South African universities claim to serve over the past decade in both local and international academia. The inherent problem within these power structures, the challenges to achieving mutually beneficial project outcomes and the growing concern of vulnerable, unheard institutional and individual voices are critical factors. The recognition of these dynamics within the emerging field of design research and design-led teaching is less nuanced in these debates. Training institutions of architecture have a rich history of undertaking service-learning initiatives to create value and learning for both the students and the stakeholders of such projects. Still, in South Africa, they are only now seen through a post-rainbow nation lens. The FeesMustFall movement is primarily driving this change. Larger institutions are recognising previously marginalised voices that now find traction in learning and practice across South Africa. This chapter reflects the author’s experience with emergent views and concerns as a researcher, lecturer and spatial design practitioner in Johannesburg. This section centres on learning regarding city-making in Southern Africa, and it presents two case studies followed by a discussion of growth opportunities.
Orli Setton, Eric Wright, Claudia Morgado, Blanca Calvo, residents and leaders of Denver Informal Settlement and the UJ Professional Practice students from 2013 to 2017.
Book chapter Open Access Publication

2021

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Teaching Design in a Post-Rainbow Nation A South African Reflection on the Limits and Opportunities of Design Praxis

Orli Setton, Eric Wright, Claudia Morgado, Blanca Calvo, residents and leaders of Denver Informal Settlement and the UJ Professional Practice students from 2013 to 2017.
Example co-developed code of engagement (Author 2017), © Jhono Bennett
© Jhono Bennett
Challenging practice students engaging in the workshop debate (The author’s photos), © Jhono Bennett
Students and staff of AT working with Denver residents on the Action Research Studio (Author’s photos), © Jhono Bennett
ABSTRACT
There has been an intense discourse on the relationship between inter-stakeholder university engagements, or service learning, and the broader society that South African universities claim to serve over the past decade in both local and international academia. The inherent problem within these power structures, the challenges to achieving mutually beneficial project outcomes and the growing concern of vulnerable, unheard institutional and individual voices are critical factors. The recognition of these dynamics within the emerging field of design research and design-led teaching is less nuanced in these debates. Training institutions of architecture have a rich history of undertaking service-learning initiatives to create value and learning for both the students and the stakeholders of such projects. Still, in South Africa, they are only now seen through a post-rainbow nation lens. The FeesMustFall movement is primarily driving this change. Larger institutions are recognising previously marginalised voices that now find traction in learning and practice across South Africa. This chapter reflects the author’s experience with emergent views and concerns as a researcher, lecturer and spatial design practitioner in Johannesburg. This section centres on learning regarding city-making in Southern Africa, and it presents two case studies followed by a discussion of growth opportunities.
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

The stool called WALDE

In contrast to space, we come into direct contact with furniture. We not only see it, but we also touch it, move it, carry it around, etc. Users feel what a piece of furniture holds and what distinguishes it from another.
Irmgard Frank
Exhibition Model TACK Exhibition Object

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The stool called WALDE

Irmgard Frank
© TACK
In contrast to space, we come into direct contact with furniture. We not only see it, but we also touch it, move it, carry it around, etc. Users feel what a piece of furniture holds and what distinguishes it from another.
Lecture / Talk Video

TACK Talks #3: Architecture and its Tacit Dimensions

© TACK
Held at the Institut für Kunst und Architektur, Akademie der Bildenden Kunst Wien, this is the initiating event in the 3rd round of TACK talks: Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing 
Lara Schrijver Tom Avermaete Angelika Schnell Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Institute for Art and Architecture
Lecture / Talk Video

October 11, 2021

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TACK Talks #3: Architecture and its Tacit Dimensions

Lara Schrijver Tom Avermaete Angelika Schnell Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Institute for Art and Architecture
© TACK
Held at the Institut für Kunst und Architektur, Akademie der Bildenden Kunst Wien, this is the initiating event in the 3rd round of TACK talks: Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing 
Reader

Konvolut

The Konvolut is a growing physical product, containing important material created by the TACK network, such as readers, programs, annotated bibliography, etc. Its concept was thought as a collection in an envelope that could grow with material over time. Its nature of being in-between and a work-in-progress fitted well with the idea of tacit knowledge. It’s playful design reflects its individual nature, as each envelope has grown differently for every owner.
Klaske Havik Tim Anstey Helena Mattsson
Reader

View

Konvolut

Klaske Havik Tim Anstey Helena Mattsson
© Janina Gosseye
© Janina Gosseye
© Janina Gosseye
© Janina Gosseye
© Janina Gosseye
The Konvolut is a growing physical product, containing important material created by the TACK network, such as readers, programs, annotated bibliography, etc. Its concept was thought as a collection in an envelope that could grow with material over time. Its nature of being in-between and a work-in-progress fitted well with the idea of tacit knowledge. It’s playful design reflects its individual nature, as each envelope has grown differently for every owner.
Paper

From Unconventional Households to Unconventional Affordable Housing

ABSTRACT
Over the past years, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars at Politecnico di Milano (UHUAH!) has been exploring how contemporary social and demographic dynamics challenge housing policies and projects. These issues have been at the core of teaching activities in design-based studios involving architecture students. Spurred on not only by the literature on the subject (Ronald/Elsinga, 2012), we are engaged in field research investigating the state of the art of dwelling practices, with the aim to develop alternative housing solutions (and typologies) able to overcome the distance that emerged between demand and supply. A gap mostly depending on the major changes that happened in the last twenty years in households composition, and in what is typically referred to as the family (Carlson/Meyer, 2014), with the consequent crisis of the ideal equivalence between “the family” and the “apartment typology” (Star strategies + architecture, 2016). The paper will therefore present relevant case studies from the Research by Design explorations conducted on existing building stock, a decision taken to empower Adaptive Reuse as a sustainable approach also in Housing. Our Design Manifesto considers the apartment as constituted by a system of independent rooms, in which the bed is not anymore the core device, while the connective space is interpreted as common shared areas (Connective = Collective).
Gennaro Postiglione Paola Briata Constanze Wolfgring
Paper

October 10, 2022

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From Unconventional Households to Unconventional Affordable Housing

Gennaro Postiglione Paola Briata Constanze Wolfgring
© Gennaro Postiglione
Drawing focusing on the life around furniture (@ReCoDe-DAStU)., © Gennaro Postiglione
Design strategy: a set of devices is set in place in dialogue with the existing structure (@ReCoDe-DAStU)., © Gennaro Postiglione
External view of one of the La Viridiana blocks (@ReCoDe-DAStU)., © Gennaro Postiglione
© Gennaro Postiglione
ABSTRACT
Over the past years, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars at Politecnico di Milano (UHUAH!) has been exploring how contemporary social and demographic dynamics challenge housing policies and projects. These issues have been at the core of teaching activities in design-based studios involving architecture students. Spurred on not only by the literature on the subject (Ronald/Elsinga, 2012), we are engaged in field research investigating the state of the art of dwelling practices, with the aim to develop alternative housing solutions (and typologies) able to overcome the distance that emerged between demand and supply. A gap mostly depending on the major changes that happened in the last twenty years in households composition, and in what is typically referred to as the family (Carlson/Meyer, 2014), with the consequent crisis of the ideal equivalence between “the family” and the “apartment typology” (Star strategies + architecture, 2016). The paper will therefore present relevant case studies from the Research by Design explorations conducted on existing building stock, a decision taken to empower Adaptive Reuse as a sustainable approach also in Housing. Our Design Manifesto considers the apartment as constituted by a system of independent rooms, in which the bed is not anymore the core device, while the connective space is interpreted as common shared areas (Connective = Collective).