Rethinking Post-Vanguard Conceptual Practices

We are witnessing a gradual shift in the perception of what constitutes architecture,from object-specific practices, celebrating the autonomy of formover landscape, to architecture as a field-driven, adaptive enterprise, withthe agility to negotiate multiple agencies, technologies, and paradigms.Parallel to this, the rise of the Expanded, Provisional Practice defined primarilyby small offices, combining advanced technologies with what MichaelSpeaks termed Post-Vanguard Design Intelligence, constitutes a model forcombining a newly emerging pragmatism with a conceptually driven attitudetowards architecture as a performative, adaptive framework for innovation.Offices which leverage both the Conceptual, Strategic and Technological,recall both the mid twentieth century practices of Jean Prouve, the EamesOffice, and others, and invoke the radical-conceptual attitudes of the sixties,within a much more subdued shroud- an anti revolutionary, perhapsevolutionary position that re-negotiates the Performative, Ecological andperhaps Parametric tendencies toward a broad Conceptual enterprise.Newly “refurbished” models of efficiency proposed by techno-parametricculture (Kieran & Timberlake: Refabricating Architecture), fail to capturethe possibilities inherent in a re-thinking of conceptually driven architecture.Similarly, the strategic recasting of labor in architecture (Deamer:Building in the Future), focuses on a neo-pragmatist approach to architecture,lacking a conceptually driven foundation. In the same vain, the invocationof Ecological Practice (Tilder: Design Ecologies) perhaps comes closestto re-instituting a critical-conceptual framework for architecture.Is it possible to entertain both a renewed sense of pragmatism in architecture,while at the same time advocating for a profound return to theconceptualist practices that informed late twentieth century work, without areturn to the “Theoretical Vanguard” but rather through Thinking in Actionand through Material Practice?The author is invested in a reconsideration of material practice combininga pragmatic leveraging of (parametric, computational) technologies, withinthe broader framework of conceptual practice. This discussion is largelyabsent in contemporary (Digital Fabrication) culture, thus the interest inposing these questions within the broader umbrella of practice, towards areconsideration of emerging modes of production.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1