Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

This research is based upon a series of spatial exercises addressing situated collective and bodily participation as a method to produce unrest (spatial friction) in the form-giving process to accommodate the complex nature of place and site.
I discuss the teaching practice through a reading of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark and especially her work with propositions. Propositions, presents a turn in Lygia Clarks practice, changing the character of art as object, to something unfolding through participation (body). This is seen in her work Caminhando and Bichos. In this research participants are architecture students and participation is understood as an collective and bodily act (participating bodily in one owns architectural practice), situated within 1st year studio of app. 25 students. Producing unrest is a way to accommodate the complexity of place and to produce an architecture of participation, both within the process of forming architecture with the potential of accommodating participation in its build form. The exercises touch upon notions of peripheral vision, the mess of collectiveness, and situated forms. These exercises materialize the idea of participation as a social aesthetic through the spatial construction of the drawing. These are translation of places through bodies as vibrant mediums in “plastic” representation (unresting drawings), that is able to both accommodate and at the same time propose spatial involvement.