Overview

Theorising the Project aims to explore a thematic approach to architectural design. It conceptualises the design process in a general sense through seven key phases: developing a thematic framework and a line of inquiry to situate the project; investigating the project brief and mapping the project site to unravel potential themes and questions; situating technology as a formative condition for design; analysing precedents from the arts, literature and architecture to elaborate implications for design and considering representation as equally constitutive of the design undertaking. Key themes which are unpacked using extensive etymologies and metaphorical associations include theory, mapping, the makeshift, potentiality and agency. The concepts of assemblage and emergence are developed to contextualise the design process and architectural settings as enabling infrastructures for thinking and practice. The book contends that design is a matter of setting up strategic and productive thematic assemblages that are not directed to the translation or formal expression of meaning, but to the framing of strategic and enabling conditions for emergent sense realised within the existential and material conditions of architecture. Succinct analyses of precedents across several disciplines are used to foreground tectonic and compositional characteristics with adaptational capacity for space, time, materiality and architectural narrative. The thematic framework of the book engages theoretical material by Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Francois Jullien, Manuel De Landa and Jean-Luc Nancy. Illustrated with drawings and photographs by the author, the book will be of interest to practitioners and students of art, design and the built environment who wish to expand the foundational premises for design, widen the creative scope of their practice and exploit the thematic and metaphorical capacities of their project work.

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9781443832960

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Reviews

Michael Tawa's scholarly theorising sweeps you along in a rush of text and thrills with its seat-of-the-pants ride. It is as if you are tapping the keyboard alongside him, no, inside him, experiencing the writing as it happens, a duet of differences, similarities and resonances that somehow tolerably adheres. Michael asserts that the book gained its voice phenomenologically, only through the circumstances of writing it, just as he argues for theorising. I have heard Michael speak many times, and I can hear him now, passionately, sensitively, insistently, even stridently at times, his words and thoughts swelling the page. While I am persuaded that this project has its own voice, it is Michael's poietic practice, his making and producing of sense, that audibilises it. Certainly all that is dangerous, disconcerting, edgy, precipitant, incipient, insouciant, abstract and enigmatic in his theorising pervades the work's revealings as, no doubt, is bound to happen in its multiple interpolations. There is intent here, but only to alert and prepare for future-possibles, not to telescope outcomes. Some might not at first fully engage the intensity of what is offered. No matter, time is patient. Like the best fiction, and even better non-fiction, not even at the last page does the ride stop. Almost callously, its momentum continues, prompting questions, ponderings, reflections. At least that happened for me, tensing my years of reading and teaching. Of course this is what Michael wants to eventually happen for everyone who tackles a project, and what he believes should happen. No preconceptions, linearities, singularities, normatives, cliches, just comprehensive preparation for multivalent themes, registers and states of mind to handle-when-ready the already-to-hand. And he helps this along by vast arrays of words and ideas, etymologies, examples, linkages, demonstrations and illuminating questions. While this book is mainly about architectural theorising, it suffuses projects of every kind. It is a great read on its own account, as much as about energising projects, and will be invaluable in teaching. For most benefit, Theorising the Project should be attended while strategically negotiating the distortions to its fabric likely caused by one's inner and outer ruptions. The rare articulation, confidence, assurance and potency of Michael Tawa's skill with words greatly assists such a working through. -Dr Paul-Alan Johnson, Senior Visiting Fellow Faculty of the Built Environment, The University of New South Wales Michael Tawa's Theorising the Project suggests considering architecture as a provisional and enabling infrastructure , and offers a place for readership which nurtures reflection and thereby enables transformational thinking. This book is about how we build our relations to the world, and about how we discover and forge the terms with which we can describe, inscribe and prescribe those relations. Driven by a lexical fascination where words are valued for their phonic impact as much as their knotty etymologies, Tawa's work moves us and lets us move across an assemblage of densely interwoven chapters. It opens up immensely useful perspectives to anyone interested in the links between theory and practice, between conceptualisation and fabrication, whilst steering refreshingly clear of such dichotomies to entertain the subtler connections borne by sensuous experience and action. Equally refreshing is Tawa's discernment between thematic and programmatic complexity, his view of the place to be accorded to constant interrogations in the design process that are driven by yearnings and learnings, concepts and contexts, consilent and resilient approaches. If what I am is what I can bring to a project , the proposed project of readership is wrought to host its subjects with all of their richly idiosyncratic concerns and leanings. Place as a conjugation of people and space is also the place of the page, where a specific confluence of different kinds of experience is here generously made accessible, and verbally meshed to others, through haunting evocations of geographical sites, scholarly citations, and incipient student visions. The perambulations and displacements, the conjugated discrepancies and scrambled expectations that condition insightful ways of approaching space and time, of being and/ in motion, are foregrounded by the quest to enable the emergent to show itself , and to develop strategies to elaborate and articulate its implications , as a new paradigm for design. Theorising the Project is a quietly, yet exuberantly extra-ordinary aide-memoire, a mnemonic and perceptive instrument, for those of us seeking re-assurance from a fellow traveller as we design our own wayfaring through the materials and ideas of which our lives are made. -Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Technologies, Director, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex, United Kingdom Consider Michael Tawa's content and range, his framing and re-framing and we soon realise that we default to theory and other not-so-small acts of self justification whenever the going gets tough in architecture. Tawa has fashioned a carefully sequenced narrative. This is a re-writing book, a re-thinking volume. Not in the crass way of setting things straight, once again recalling the naivety of insight that catches us all off guard. Instead, Tawa invites us to test the very nature of 'framing' itself, whether via words, whorls or worlds. Writing the critical project has often become blurred with building the critical project and Tawa indicates why. Theorising the project has thus never been easy and is likely to be less so as we progress in a world of double-take which looks back at scaffolded theories and supporting histories that have operated - often unchallenged - for many decades in the architectural profession. Here, Tawa takes us through source and resource, in their widest sense. By loosening the formative thinking from which architectural design draws out its meaning, alibis and allegiances are thereby tested. Allegiances have always been questionable, of course, but elegantly disguised. Tawa shows how our first irritant must be the way we justify an architectural assembly, gesture or choice of material. Only then passing through this fatigue, these alibis, the reader - student, scholar or architect - is invited to understand how much of the critical support and writing in architecture over the last few decades has brilliantly missed the point of the actual use and abuse of theory. We frame, we re-frame; we source, we re-source; we theorise and we read deeply or then superficially, sometimes to fall fatigued. The helter skelter of semantics and semiotics that once held the last century to hostage become devices so common to us in offering projections of worlds we have already made and agreed with inside ourselves. Tawa debates this; he turns up the tarot card that reads - you have a future. Then he asks us to feel the edge, to read across life and architecture until we accept our own responsibility. What is theory for? Words, whorls, worlds? How many times has this question remained unasked whilst being written about extensively? The being in question is architecture itself. Tawa, in contest and elegance, takes us inside. Professor Roger Connah, Associate Director Graduate Studies, Carleton university, Ottawa

Author Information

Michael Tawa is an architect and Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Between 2006 and 2009 he was Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He has practiced and taught architecture in Alice Springs, Adelaide and Sydney. His previous book, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing was Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture (2010). Current projects include the web-based Design Lexicon and research on the concepts of emergence and translation in architectural design.

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