The paper and presentation engage topics, methodologies and results, explored in architecture design studios inquiring on ‘impermanence’ as a primary driver of planning and design decisions. The studios address the challenge of designing structures that engage uncertainty of contexts as a driving factor – either as existing constraints or invited conditions of change. The studios work within an immersive and interactive space of research – a audio-visual Lab of 32’x39’x14′ with 128 speakers as well as motion tracking and sensing equipment – which works as a ‘black box’ to simulate experiments with intersections of materials of a wide spectrum. As well, the studios encompass a diverse context of teaching, from fully synchronous in person, to remote or asynchronous with immersive engagement. The projects address aspects of time-based behavior, and how spatial presence can be created in physical and remote ways, enabling reflections on interactivity, participation and collaboration in programmatic spaces with different forms of intelligence. The work acknowledges contemporary times and values of model vs reaction, the infrastructural vs the superfluous, the permanent vs the temporary. From the prominent association of architectural design (buildings) with structural models of permanence – the technological, and specially, digital acceleration across the last century expanded the lexicon of architectural design tools and put pressure on its core methods, typologies, materials and models to respond to rapidly shifting situations.
Carla Leitão is an architect, professor, & writer. At RPI Architecture since 2010, Leitao’s studios and seminars explore the intersection of architecture, urban systems, technology, ubiquitous cultures and immersive VR. In the last 5 years, Leitao has led a number of design studios at the CRAIVE Lab. Co-Founder of AUM Studio and Spec.AE. Architectural design, writer, curation, theory, scenarios, & interactive media; residential, installations, competitions in Europe and the US. Curated and organized “Portugal Now”/Cornell AAP Folio, 2007. https://www.clatcraive.net/