“Open-Source Architecture” - Convivium Seminar
Convivium is a set of informal academic gatherings to spark engaging, entertaining and in-depth conversation open to all on selected topics of architecture theory at Cornell AAP. The topic of Spring 2013 was selected as “Open-Source”, and Gökhan Kodalak representing ABOUTBLANK delivered a presentation called “Producer-Architecture: Open-Source Spatial Formation”.The presentation analyzes the asymetrical power relationship between the Architect and the User throughout history, in which design and construction processes have always been controlled by the expert knowledge of the Architects who have mostly felt responsible for their clients and patrons instead of users and masses. Thus, architecture has been formulated as a fait accompli for users, obliged from then on to make the best of it for they-along with their desires and demands-were never included in the design process in the first place.
The presentation, in this sense, provides a critique of the hierarchical structure of the architectural profession, its imposed fixity of power relations, and its frigid and rigid role casting among the architect as the genius creator, the user as the passive consumer, and the space as the catatonic background. The speculative proposal instead constructs a new trio of the Producer-Architect, the Producer-User, and the Producer-Space influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s Producer-Product concept, following a wide range of inter-disciplinary examples including OMA’s Prada Transformer, Levi Strauss’s Bricoleur and MacGyver, Lucien Kroll’s participatory architectural experiments, Marcos Novak’s Transactive Intelligence, dECOI’s Hyposurface, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Ivan Illich’s Convivial Tools, John Cage’s 4’33’’, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Date: April 2013
Type: Architectural Theory Presentation and Discussion
Program: lecture
Host: Cornell AAP
Presentation: Gökhan Kodalak
Organization: Convivium 2013 - Gökhan Kodalak, Youngjin Yi, Whitten Overby
Location: USA, New York
Status: Realized
