Science without Borders - Architectural Intervention
The courses in Architectural Intervention are structured around the idea of architectural intervention, interrogated in relationship to its duration and effects in and around the community where it takes place, in its potential to create community. Whilst the courses approach can be related to certain artistic practices, they are rooted in an understanding of spatial conceptualization and production as the architect´s most important skill.
The course package explores the possibilities of architectural practices which conceive and articulate diverse processes of community development and transformation. The "sites" of these interventions in the public sphere are in general, not given, and their 'construction' includes involvement with other institutions, governmental agencies and other actors. The projects are often developed in non-western environments, which makes cultural understanding and research also essential to the programme.
At the Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention, we believe that our only option is to understand, critique, intervene in, and devise the various apparatuses which are enmeshed in our enactments of the world as human beings and therefore as architects in order to qualitatively transform the worlds we inhabit.
Our work questions one of architecture's apparatuses - the oft-persistent mirroring and representation of spaces of neoliberal agendas - and develops transversal, diffractive methodologies that produce effects in exchange with, and to transform, sites.
The Laboratory interrogates an expanded notion of site. Sites, as apparatuses, are made, not 'given'. Real local, regional, national, and global issues transverse the laboratory's practices of performative, immediate intervention in, and transformation of, space in 'real time and place'.
The Laboratory broadens the architect's range of activities, and empowers its community through its members' ability to actually make a difference. This making a difference entangles us ethically and politically in the world.
