Performative architecture

Abstract

The following thesis explores two central hypotheses. On the one hand it introduces the idea of performative architecture (performance in design), and has done so with the desire to contribute directly to the expansion of design education and practice. It proposes stretch the boundaries of the discipline by challenging current paradigms on architectural theory and practice by conveying an axiom of active engagement between artifacts and their environments with human users/inhabitants forming part of such an environment. Performance is here proposed as the action that mediates the two forces of artifice and environment. The second hypothesis of this thesis has been to offer a distinct point of view regarding analogue relations-as asserted by this work-between the design process-as it relates to pedagogy and practice-and the performance of design (considered through that which is built, materialized and produced) as it engages with its surroundings. Designing requires fundamental ambiguity, imposing both theoretically and empirically, a methodological systematization of two recurrent and consequent processes: mergence and emergence. I will describe how both, explained by Shape Grammars design theory, are complimentary and interdependent processes, mergence in order to produce the essential ambiguity required and emergence in order to embed and operate, and that this processes are present both during the design process (designing) and during the experience of design (inhabiting/using). These two hypotheses temporarily blur the distinction between environment and design artifact, or between natural and artificial, and propose a displacement of these distinctions towards the performance of the interfaces between such conditions, independent of their "natural" or "artificial" transient connotations. I will describe how this manifold notion of performance can be used to understand this displacement in architectural discourse, and its practical implications towards a performative architecture.