Productive Limits: Architects Gone Exploratory

The colloquium is envisioned as a platform of discussion between architectural scholars and practitioners, emerging thinkers of architecture and an interested public on the question of architectural efficacy. Traditionally architecture's potential to invigorate social and individual life derives from its ability to design and materialise buildings and cities. Yet when architects retreat from design and engage in other domains of architecture (e.g. history, theory and publishing) and adjacent disciplines (e.g. anthropology, geopolitics, computation, creative writing and philosophy), architecture's efficacy derives from design-thinking rather than the activity of designing. Based on a series of presentations and particular cases, the colloquium will expose how limits within architecture stimulate a transformation of design from a modality of conception into a modality of exploration and how thereby architecture opens up new trajectories of thought for the humanities, technical sciences and publishing.

Participants include recent alumni, invited guests and members of the faculty of the Institute for Art and Architecture.

PROGRAM

Friday, 17th December 2010
19.00 Opening
Welcome by Nasrine Seraji

Saturday, 18th December 2010 (Room 211a, 2nd Floor )
10.30   Introduction by Sophie Hochhäusl and Manuel Singer

Nasrine Seraji "Introductory Lecture"
Barbara Feller "Key Note Lecture" (in German language)

12.00   Panel 1 - Domains
Moderation: Elke Krasny

Benedit Boucsein & Axel Humpert "Society as architecture's ultimate limit: towards a productive dialogue"
Christina Lenart "Split practice: critique as design, design as materialisation"
Sophie Hochhäusl "Oppositions, Assemblage, Any, Volume"

14.30   Panel 2 - Operations
Moderation: Markus Vogel

Lisa Wiesenthal "The ambiguity of abstraction: mapping knowledge in anthropology and architecture"
Melisa Vargas "Limit = design = content"
Richard Schaffranek "Optimising architecture"
Rüdiger Suppin "Syn-Wall"

16.45   Panel 3 - Appropriations
Anthony Morin "The design persona: mental bifurcation and authorial multiplicity"
Daniel Glaser "On residues"
Manuel Singer "What we are waiting for"

18.15   Final Discussion

In Cooperation with the Alumni Club of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, supported by the Department of Science and Research Promotion at the Cultural Office of the City of Vienna, MA7

www.akbild.ac.at/ika