Kerstin Thompson Architects: Monash University Museum of Art

Introduction

This chapter offers an affective critique of the fractured, disjunctive, creative process within the very heart of architectural production. Behind the popular myth of the individual genius architect or designer lies a significantly more complex, disjointed, and multifaceted practice: one in which not all the actors are human in form, nor need have a form at all. Within architectural production there is generally a large design team with distinct roles and responsibilities: from architects and engineers to landscape architects and lighting and acoustic consultants; all pursing different interests within the same venture. In most projects, each is contractually and professionally separate; a practice tending to disassociate activities from each other within the one architectural becoming. Remaining a limited description, it discounts the wider entanglement of actors, materials, and societal forces. Thus within the interplay of people and activities, there are non-human bodies at play including design elements, objects, and processes: notably, these trigger and spread affective stutters more so than the human bodies they influence. This significantly broader perspective is portrayed in the recent ethnographic works Albena Yaneva reflects upon in her work ‘New voices.’ Such studies embrace ‘[architecture as a collective process of negotiation, and one that is also shared with a variety of nonhumans (materials, models, software, renderings) ... as a composition of many heterogeneous elements, an assemblage.’¹ Here, heterogeneous and autonomous bodies (human and non-human) rub and affect each other - where the in-between and the act of rubbing as creative stutters takes primacy over the bodies themselves. Affect is seen to attach (albeit momentarily) to human and non-human entities, ‘things,’ whereby both it and such entities are potentially transformed by the journey. Thus affect, this disembodied entity, itself stutters through the different encounters - its capacity, propensity, orientation, and force changing: so transformed, and autonomously reinserted into the design process, it transforms the very design itself.

In asking how we might grasp this transfiguration of affect as stuttering in the work and process of architectural design?, this work draws upon Deleuze to investigate the fractured and disjunctive condition of practice as stuttering processes in all their variability. Within this context, stutters that occur in the design process (architectural becoming) are taken as problematising the possible by inserting contingency in the emergence of the new: a tension existing between the stutter fractured conditions which always occur in the in-betweenness of bodies, time and practice. Betti Marenko describes this as ‘the tension existing in design between form-making, on one side, and the need to acknowledge, and work with, the contingent, on the other.’² Within this unbalanced system, affect defies definition as productiveness governed by functional equivalence: unframed by our concerns, it exceeds human exploitation - potentialising the world beyond anthropocentrism. Following Deleuze, the stutter is processual, a way of understanding design that is non-linear and emergent - a disjunctive creativity at the core of design.

At this point, it is necessary to clarify two terms, ‘practice’ and ‘process’; for while they are sometimes used interchangeably there are fundamental differences to be acknowledged. Unlike ‘practice,’ which suggests something absolute, fixed, or ‘authoritative,’³ the word ‘process’ has something of the temporary about it. Referring to sets of relations, process is inherently in-motion, generating relationships through effects, experiences, and interactions. In this sense, ‘process’ is connected to notions of ‘practicing architectures’ as proposed by Jacobs and Merriman,⁴ and explored by Peggy Deamer in her writing ‘Practicing Practice.’'¹ This grammatical shift, practice to practicing, exposes potentials within generative and relational design processes, particularly the in-betweens and intensities beyond the terms of individual relationships: a crucial distinction, for this chapter seeks to situate affect within the interplay of architectural, landscape, and artistic design processes.

Situating affect in this manner evokes a two-fold question: how can practices and design processes be apprehended through affect; and more specifically, how does affect hold together (through stilled stutters), disperse (through disjunctions), and animate (through quickened stutters) different ways of designing? In response, this chapter promotes affects, though unembodied, as ‘sticky,’ and hence attachments and orientations amount to sticky processes. Exampling this attribute, the study explores how affect, as stickiness-in-process, enabled Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA), in collaboration with landscape architects Fiona Flarrisson and Simon Ellis, and artist Callum Morten, to bring together disparate bodies and design processes through the Monash University Museum of Art project (MUMA). These are processes fractured and disjunctive; stuttering operations sharing a productive relationship through the affective medium of diagramming. Additionally, this interplay generates different, yet interlinked, iterations of diagrammatic spatial configurations for MUMA; acting as both a communicative and a generative tool, it enables a multitude of design conditions, effects, and atmospheres.