Double (Hunch) Negative: Blending Practice/Research/Teaching and the Critical Imagination

In Duckler’s account of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, the viewer becomes a part of the overall experience of scale, of site, and the knowledge of place. In a sense, perception, feeling, and scale hold a very complex relationship in the eye of the participant, and this brings Heizer’s earthwork closer to architecture than one might expect. This correlation between experience, scale perception, and placemaking can enrich the educational experience, thereby affecting the balance of forces that exist between academia, practice, and research. At least, that is the hunch that drew us to the 2019 Antwerp ACSA/EAAE International Teacher Conference. By discussing how a blend-ed set of practices (practice/teaching/research) enabled a mutually reinforcing dialog between the making of ideas, buildings, and landscapes, this paper will present design practice and the practice of design education as inter-related activities. Through our collaborative efforts, we have worked to make the space of inquiry a continuous field that reaches across conventional divisions between the academy and practice. Within this field, research helps ground “the hunch” while “the hunch” tempers the formality of research.Our hunch is this: that a case study of a recent design think-tank will illustrate how we see:• expertise developed in the academic environment can be incorporated into an inquisitive professional design practice;• the studio (both academic and professional) as a thinker space that should not follow a commercial agenda nor should it become a space absent of craft and speculation, urge and fascination, skill and imagination, criticality and creativity, individual formation and social consciousness.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.48

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4