Learning from Zoodio paper to be presented at ACSA SE conf October 8-10

excerpt from paper:

In the introduction to her book Organization Space, Keller Easterling writes about the difficulty architects have thinking in verbs, “Architects are typically more fluent in descriptions of activity and relationships that result in artifacts and forms within conventions that favor the designation of site as a single entity. We are most comfortable with nouns rather than verbs…”  She suggests an expansion of terms that “describe spatial organizations with active parts, temporal components, or differential change.”  Geology is a good example of this: a glacier can be measured, quantified, located, observed, experienced, as a thing [noun] in the world. At the same time, the glacier is a system in flow [verb] that changes over time and is acted on by a complex set of conditions. ...

... I believe that the noun-state of architecture: static, bounded, demarcated, impoverishes the potential of architecture to act and be acted on by plural forces. The verb opens the door for the multi-scalar, enmeshed, and fluid. It also helps ensure that architecture is not limited to the purely physical via reductionist and mechanistic thinking. The notion of landscape developed by cultural geographers such as Daniels and Cosgrove, is instructive here; for cultural geographers, landscape refers simultaneously to material space and to ways of both seeing and representing space through various media. In his book Landscapes of Power, the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell wrote that landscape can be understood not only as a noun but also as a verb because it has the potential to be both physical and discursive. The heteroglossial intersection of history, politics, governmental strategies, and distinct or everyday events actively figure and are figured by material space. The traditional noun-reading of a space: static, bounded and scenographic, does not have the capacity to uncover the verb-reading: the rich intersection of forces that can be summarized as the cultural politics of a place. Material space and the spatial dimensions of cultural politics are equally important to a representation of place for they work in tandem to provoke new ways of seeing and being. How can we teach an architectural design process that is both physical and discursive? ...

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