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Building Insights: Architectural knowledge, lived experience and the crafting of place. 01/03/2023 - 29/02/2024

Abstract

'Building Insights' addresses 'knowing' in architecture by exploring traditional craftsmanship in relation to codified knowledge systems. Focusing on an apprenticeship in traditional stone masonry in Greece, it aims to recover overlooked architectural knowledge and to elucidate obscured aspects of the cultural agency of architecture. Through the apprenticeship, this project reveals how processes of building engage with 'lower' levels of bodily disposition - the embodied knowledge of craft - and 'higher' levels of intellect and intuition - architectural thinking. Within this tension, the experience of the craftsperson (and the architect) is developed, as well as their intuition, their ability to think-in-action and to creatively respond to real situations and problems. The close study of the apprenticeship unpacks how preand early modern ways of building have yielded places with a strong evocative potential and a distinct communicative power. By investigating the participatory reconstruction of a dry-stone kalderimi (cobbled pathway), the project shows the value of an architecture that attunes different spheres of experience, kinds of knowledge and areas of culture. The project focuses on the role of habit and skill in practice-based knowledge. It utilizes Michael Polanyi's concept of Indwelling to explain how a heuristic tension unfolds from the 'depths' of our biological being to the 'heights' of ideas and cultural values, underlying all forms of knowing. The spatial and temporal metaphor of Indwelling articulates how human consciousness is opened to knowledge primarily through our physical engagement with the world, situated in space and time. To unravel the different dimensions of architectural activity, the research employs tools drawn from different epistemes of architectural theory (Avermaete 2021). The (auto)ethnographic study of the apprenticeship shows a lived experience of architecture, which embraces practical, symbolic and imaginary levels, while its discourses and epistemes tend to disconnect from these evocative dimensions. By illuminating the steps from the 'lower' to the 'higher' dimensions of the built environment, it shows how specific cultural contexts and value systems affect the fundamental perspectives of architectural theory, even contradicting established perspectives. As a whole, the project explores these instances of tacit knowledge embedded in a particular craft and particular site, resulting in a better understanding of the role of tacit knowing and how architecture can address new and pressing issues in the complex condition of the built environment.

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  • Research Project