Architectural imaginaries: drawing, image, narrative, figuration.
Imagination is our bodies’ point of entrance into the virtual and the not-yet differentiated, the emergent and unfinished, the yet-to-come or the utopic. Thus, as we confront challenges as the climate crisis or the emergence of post-human sensibilities, imagination remains the essential faculty to keep the future open, democratic and inclusive. It is also a key instrument for an architectural practice willing to collectively transform our environment, for it is capable of placing us somewhere not there yet, making it concrete and present while letting us come together within it, to think it, make it and engage with it.
In this research line, and leaving behind pure concerns linked to representation, we work from a notion of architectural image that goes beyond the visual to the fully embodied. We seek to ground imagination by focusing on the social and affective means by which new images are created, but also on what those images do to those social and material worlds. We do this through an analysis of the role and extent of drawing, a key tool to apprehend our environment while projecting our imagination; of gestures, as diagrammatic corporeal traces setting new dimensional frameworks where alternative articulations of the world are made present; of the architectural effectiveness of narrative devices capable of threading common spatialities through shared images; or of the political dimension of figurations as they gather the multiple through material assemblages of images, words and affects.
Related areas of research:
– Drawing and imagination in architecture.
– Collective imaginaries and spatial (con)figurations.
– Narrative as architectural tool.
– Beyond the visual: affective images.
– Situated practices and embodied knowledge.
– Architectural diagrams, gestures and traces.
– Real-time, media and architectural imaging.
– Institutional imagination.
– Processes of collective authorship.
– Making as thinking.
– Bottom up processes of spatial planning.