MA Architecture ... Magical Fabrications

Excited to be back at the Canterbury School of Architecture to complete a final semester in MA Architecture; this semesters basis for study is reliant upon a hands-on approach to making through invention and fabrication...

The place where earth and heaven meet, Flammarion engraving [artist unknown]

Magical Fabrications: Thematic overview:

MAGICAL:

1. relating to, using, or resembling magic

2. beautiful or delightful in a way that seems removed from everyday life

FABRICATION:

1. the process of producing a thing

2. an invention, concoction or myth

"A travelling magician seeks to stimulate a sense of wonder in her audience. She does this by unpacking and constructing a trick. The scenario that she describes, although theatrical, is usually grounded in normal terminologies and so is accepted as normal by the observer. Once this suspension of disbelief has occurred, our magician’s performance manipulates aspects of the observer’s perception, subverting preconceived couplings of cause and effect by sleight of hand. As the audience attempt to reconstruct how these tricks work, moments of collective delight are created.

In many ways, an Architect behaves in the same way as the Magician. Starting from an imagined audience, the Architect coordinates space as a performance. This arrangement is based on what we think that the audience will appreciate and enjoy; we repeatedly deploy ‘tricks’ from our design repertoire. Once again, it is the reconstruction of the constituent moves of this trickery that we hope will engender delight in our audience, the occupants of our buildings.

It is therefore of value for us, as Architects, to explore and understand more deeply how the performer - audience couple works and how the notion of ‘delight’ in architecture can be triggered. During the next year, we will seek to explore how patterns, motion and phenomena of performance that we perceive in the natural world might be reconstructed by the observer, forming a mimetic cultural manufacture of imagination, ritual and meaning. We will examine how this process might guide to the production of artefacts and the crafting of objects that seek to interact or communicate with their user.
Themes of kinesis, time-based performance, perceived animism and the inaccuracies of reality will frame enquiry into our primary question; how people construct understandings of the world and how, as designers, we can manipulate these processes to create novelty and a sensation of wonder"

Course lead by Sam McElhinney