How does architectural form and space emerge between the forest and the factory? How does matter and materiality emerge between the kitchen and the laboratory? We pose these questions in a discursive backdrop that has come to implicate the material engagements of design practices narrowly in analogies of either forest or factory, and kitchen or laboratory. Rarely do the physical and mental, prosaic and poetic, mundane and exceptional experiences of spatial and material explorations in the design fields, fit within the dualistic notions of either/or. More so, a focus on materiality in the design fields often forecloses the latent possibilities that matter, as a substance produced between the realms of forest-factory or kitchen-laboratory, could present for phenomenological explorations. Yet, the ambition of design explorations to engage the body, offering phenomenological provocations - for instance, to exist within a cloud, walk between raindrops, swim in an ocean, or run through sand dunes - essentially traverses such latent possibilities. The other register emerging in design thinking is of apparatuses of making through which new possibilities open up beyond the confines of teleological trajectories of manufacturing. In doing so, built forms essentially slide between states of matter.

States of matter is a symposium that intends to engage provocations on such latent possibilities of inhabitations between form and matter. It draws attention to the dialectical relationship between technology and phenomenology in exploring space and form as it intersects with matter and materiality. The conversations aim to open up histories of a shared technological present - to interrogate, for instance, the situatedness of craft in primordial artisanal practices; standardized production and universal culture of the factory; and, the scenographic and algorithmic logics in the digital laboratory. We delve in this series of SEA City conversations into an ‘in-between,’ not as hybrid, but as explorations into matter and material processes whose states - through their coagulation and clouding, sedimentation and decomposition, etc. - are ‘in-formation’ to shape emergent phenomenologies that could inform future design pedagogy and praxis.


speakers

16.12.22     Anubha Sood  <<
20.01.23     Oliver Tessmann
27.01.23     Manjunath BL
24.02.23     Anne Holtrop
10.03.23     Teja Gavankar
24.03.23     Tomas Garcia

on Fri., 16th Dec 2022 @ 6:30 PM IST

Between Salt and Water focuses on the study of seagrasses and ocean water collected from three oceans and studied through dyeing, weaving, and material softening processes. The primary focus of this collection of experiments is to observe how the material configures itself so as to reveal new kinds of information - more concretely, the relationship between our production processes and the natural world.


ABOUT

Sood's exploratory practice is devoted to the study of bio-materials, from bacteria and human hair to her latest, seagrasses. Her formative years were spent in India, where she witnessed the environmental and social toll exacted by the textile industry in her native home. Sood’s work critiques these current production systems while visualizing a more equitable, sustainable path forward. She sees weaving, the intuitive act of making, as a personal healing process and a catalyst to physically engage with her environment.

Sood received her M.F.A. in Fiber Art from Parsons School of Design, New York, USA.  She won The Global Design Graduate award in Sustainability 2020. Her work has been exhibited at Carpenters Workshop Gallery (New York, USA), Mana Contemporary (New Jersey, USA), and Australian Tapestry Workshop (Melbourne, AUS). Her work has been featured in iD magazine, Dezeen, Design Miami, Wallpaper, Interior Design Magazine, and more.




This is an online series. It has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
The events are free and open to everyone across the world.

on Fri., 20th Jan 2023 @ 5:30 PM IST

Overcoming linear material flows within architectural construction and avoiding further exploitation of scarce resources requires a fundamental shift in the way we conceptualize, design, materialize and assemble architecture. We need to fundamentally reassess the conceptual/theoretical framework of durability, permanence and linear material flows in architecture that still heavily rely on the Vitruvian idea of firmitas in which mass and solidity are meant to form an eternal architecture. This notion of permanence of buildings is deeply woven into the disciplinary thinking and the value system of architecture and prevents an integration of circular strategies within the design, use and reuse of buildings and their components. The DDU research team explores digital design strategies of reuse, and autonomous robotic assembly  in which permanence is not established within a single building but through building elements that endure as reused components in potentially numerous buildings, sites, and functions.



ABOUT

Oliver Tessmann is an architect and professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt where he is heading the Digital Design Unit (DDU). His teaching and research revolves around computational design, digital manufacturing and robotics in architecture. From 2012 – 2015 he has been assistant professor in the School of Architecture of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. From 2008 – 2011 he has been a guest professor at Staedelschule Architecture Class (SAC) and worked with the engineering office Bollinger + Grohmann in Frankfurt. In 2008 Oliver Tessmann received a doctoral degree at the University of Kassel. His work has been published and exhibited in Europe, Asia and the US.



This is an online series. It has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
The events are free and open to everyone across the world.

on Fri., 27th Jan 2023 @ 5:30 PM IST

Manjunath believes that an ability to perceive matter beyond one’s bodily scale allows an understanding of the relation between space and matter afresh. For example, one experiences the space under the tree in conjunction with the tunes of unseen elements like the sound of birds, the wind, piercing light, temperature variation etc. This is possible only when you start looking “beyond” the tree into other dimensions. This talk enquires into the methods of perceiving the reality of hidden forces like gravity, heaviness of earth, direction of wind, variation of pressure and their translation into form and space.

 
ABOUT

B L Manjunath is the Associate Professor (Structures) at the Wadiyar Centre for Architecture. His journey started with his Master’s in Engineering (Civil) from the University Vishweshwaraiah College of Engineering in Bengaluru in 1985. In the same year, Manjunath began working with Umesh B Rao & Co, a leading structural engineering consultancy in Bengaluru, until 1994. Since its inception, Manjunath & Co. has been working on designing and detailing with specialised techniques for material handling plants. Their team has designed thermal stations, townships, hotels, industrial buildings, housing apartments and such varied projects.



This is an online series. It has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
The events are free and open to everyone across the world.

on Fri., 24th Feb 2023 @ 5:30 PM IST

The materiality of an architectural project is often understood as its construction and expression. Holtrop's own relationship with material has shifted towards the process of working a material and its specific associated gestures. This focus enables his practice to find form as a consequential result of intervening in the process of making.

The site of a project in turn binds material and gesture together, especially looked at from a geological perspective, by studying how the landscape is formed, what the ground consists of, and how it is changing. The exploration of the soil, sand, stone, minerals, as well as the crust, faults, cracks, hills and craters, inform material sourcing and the possibilities of building.

In order to gain a fundamental understanding of a territory the studio explores its geological formations and its material consistence and engage in human practices that have build specific relationships with a specific place, to produce an architecture that is solely focused on the relationship between site, gesture and material.



ABOUT

Anne Holtrop (1977 / Netherlands) is an Associate Professor at the ETH in Zurich. He started his own practice in 2009. The practice received the Charlotte Köhler Prize for Architecture by the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation in 2007, the Lakov Chernikhov International Prize in 2016 and the Aga Khan Award in 2019. The work of the studio, as well as the teaching and research outcome are presented and collected internationally in biennales and institutions, recently at the first Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the Seoul Architecture Biennial, Frac Le Plateau and at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

In 2015 the first two major buildings, Museum Fort Vechten and the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain, were completed. Recently realized is the Customs House in Manama, operational as the main post office, and the Qaysariya Suq and Green Corner Building in Muharraq. The studio has completed new stores worldwide for Maison Margiela with flagship stores in London, Paris, Osaka and Shanghai, and is currently working on several Unesco listed heritage buildings in Muharraq: Murad Boutique Hotel and Siyadi Pearl Museum and in Riyadh the MiSK Art Institute. Currently the studios are based in Amsterdam (NL) and Muharraq (BH).


This is an online series. It has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
The events are free and open to everyone across the world.

on Fri., 10th Mar 2023 @ 5:30 PM IST

Teja Gavankar’s artistic practice explores form and its qualities in pictorial space. Trained as a painter, Gavankar’s interest shifted from two dimensional representation to three dimensional space during her post graduate study wherein her forms and their perceptual fields began to be reshaped. Materials, their possibilities and limitations, play a significant role in the way these shapes deform, skew or distort in her work. Gavankar will touch upon the importance of new forms, how they get modified by the physicality of material, and what happens when we perceive them back. The lecture contemplates upon how we expand our associations and the way we see the world around us.


ABOUT

She has participated in several shows and residencies across the world including Khoj international artist association, Delhi, 2015, What about art, Mumbai, 2017, Space studio, Baroda, 2019, Verticale Artist Center, Laval, Canada, 2016 and Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation supported International (India-Quebec) Residency at The Darling Foundry, Montreal, Canada, 2014. Her works have been commissioned for the Young Subcontinent at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa 2016, When is Space? at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, 2018, Navigation is Offline at Bhubaneshwar Art Trail, Odisha, 2018. She was part of a collaborative project with Case Design and has showcased her work at Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 Italy.

Teja received the Nasreen Mohamedi Award in MVA Display, M.S.U. Baroda, 2014. Recently she received Space 118 awarded as Contemporary residences artist 2020. She has been part of many group shows, recent one was at Artissima [Italy], Sakshi Gallery [Mumbai]. She teaches Design the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai. Teja lives and works in Mumbai.



This is an online series. It has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
The events are free and open to everyone across the world.