VIRTUAL: Applying Education

Abstract

The paper proposes a new design methodology which uses a kind of layering that can be used to look at, cope with, or create complexity in a world that both space and time are increasingly more fragmented and at the same time more interconnected and fluid. It all started with the need to design a method for painting, teaching, writing about, as well as practicing architecture. Collage proved unsuitable for the challenge at hand, and a unique kind of layering technique was developed in painting which offered a way to indeed deal with fragmentation and continuity at the same time. This artistic practice was then used in teaching architectural design and proved to offer an alternative and quite liberating method for coping with complexity creatively. In the meantime, it also offered a different format for writing papers since layers started navigating between papers. The research, perhaps naturally, then started investigating the relationship between layering and the narratives generated ‘by’, ‘with’, ‘though’, or ‘despite ‘architecture. Like a setup of communicating vessels, this layering methodology also proved quite helpful as a common platform for materials from different fields or domains to coexist and thus be potentially related if not connected, evoking the notion of transparency as the condition where elements may belong to more than one reference system. It may also be seen as similar to the notion of the ‘brutal fact’ where the observer/visitor is allowed in, not before (abstraction) or after(figuration) but during the creative act.