Technologies of Experience and Intravention : A Floating, Silent Room

• The paper aims at thinking through the collaborative process of conceiving and making an ‘impossible’ room inside Umeå School of Architecture: a small, more intimate, warm and silent space – a room that floats in the air – thought as an alternative to the excessively open, cold and loud spaces of the building. The room is at the same time a u-topian space and a practice of world transformation: an impossible room in relation to the difficulties of its materialization and to its performance as a critique of the discursive, regulatory and regulated space of the university; and an act of construction that operates not only through material re-arrangements and the physical transformation of the spaces of the school but also with important effects regarding symbolic capitals, relational ecologies, the lives of those involved, shared responsibilities and the establishment of the common.Exploring this ‘something common’ involves developing alternative value systems in order to document and judge the effects of the ‘intravention’ both in the spaces of the school and in the times, academic experiences and, particularly, the lives of the actors involved in or affected by the project.We will be using two other transversal notions along that of intravention: the idea of technologies of experience will help us think through and develop ways of affording spatial experiences instead of looking at technology as an isolated, autonomous construct; and the idea of collaborative affordance, suggesting that straightforward, uncomplicated solutions enable an experience of participation/contribution that can yield effects in terms of the responsibility, care and fidelity to the things built by those involved in its design and construction.We believe architecture must move away from divisions between theory and practice - or thinking and making - and incorporate also affective and non-representational dimensions to the task of ‘architecting’ the world. This can happen through the production and invention of new ways of thinking/making/feeling – or caring – transversally and inseparably based on the specific conditions of a situation, privileging an open-ended, processual and experience-based way of knowing and being in the world.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Architectural Technology

Experience

Intravention

Affordance

Collaborative Practices

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)