Form + Content Gallery

From the Department of Public Design
RE: Found objects, materials and arcane constructions

Council of Architects MEMO
From:  Member Roehr

This project has grown out of a conversation amongst a specific group of working architects interested in exploring new ways of working together that might leverage their particular (sometimes peculiar) skills and collective energy to new and unforeseen ends.  The project itself is an effort to tease out that ever mystifying and primal relationship between things and meaning - how meaning imbues a thing; how a thing embodies meaning.  This is a perennial question in our practice, and the question that holds the potential to open architecture well beyond itself.  As a group effort, the project has also become an exploration of the relationship between the realms of highly personal and collective meaning.  It has taken a group of people who are typically engaged in the controlled, detailed, orchestrated manipulation of the environment into a highly ambiguous situation in which the very ground rules for what we are doing together are in constant flux and negotiation, pushing everyone beyond their comfort zone.  The conversation is fundamentally unstable, and is constantly going meta; the danger is to tumble through an infinite regress of reflection about what we are trying to achieve.  But that is also the thrill, and cuts to the heart of the balance we are always seeking as architects and artists, and presumably as humans - a provisional equilibrium between order and chaos - an equilibrium that momentarily suspends negotiation and allows us to act.  The resulting artifact will be less an artwork or installation per se, and more the record of this process, manipulated to highlight and clarify itself.