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Abstract:

RADICAL SATURATION - Untitled States of Doom (RS) is proposed as a mature method to search for meaningful existence within a changing architectural culture, pushing the young architect to build character and to perform that character to pierce its rendering, on repeat. Our culture glides on the surface—light, fast, unnatural, superficial, conflictual—and our lives are hyperreal; they are themed, spectacular, illusionary. Social media reshape processes and discourse in architecture, as well as the general environment in which architects live and work. In this accelerated world of prefiguration and project realization, the relation between the render, as a visual translation of the imagined into the real, and the physical world blurs. Pieterjan Ginckels describes this contemporary state as one of radical saturation. Architecture's rapid shifts in mediation have happened over the heads of its worker bees. Stuck in the render trap, architects are bypassed by more organic, more malleable, faster means of communication. Our disciplinary foam deflated in ffwd, and its soapy bubble puddle seems not a good spaceto be in. We cannot but declare the rendered image as architecture's bottom line product and the blogosphere as its rabbit hole. This research project explicitly questions why architects work the way they work, in times that tell us the ways have changed. Or, more productively, how to change the way we work, in order to work? This thesis was incited by Pieterjan Ginckels' art and architecture practices, most importantly the work under the name SPEEDISM. He recognized speed as a fundamental characteristic of currents, and tried to embrace it to retaliate. The strategies of surrender, its techniques and performative instruments that were consequently developed in practice, are published as SPEEDISM—The Dead Angle of Architecture. As such, the SPEEDISM methodology is dissected without revealing its innermost secrets, careful not to pierce through all the pictures at once. SOLAR SAFARI presents itself as an artist book, in which Ginckels exposes Speed Trip, a performative sightseeing format developed over the past decade. Both method actor and easy rider, the Speed Tripper surrenders to its context and, equipped with necessary props, finds herself at the center of mediation. Consequently, through testing and implementation in a broader spectrum of research and educational environments, the author expanded this embedded practice and its strategies towards a more collectively usable scheme. He has developed a mood (Dread) into an attitude (Cool Criticality), learned how to build character, and how to perform that character to pierce the rendering, on repeat. As the focus from SPEEDISM to RS shifts from the architectural project to the architect, character-bildung finds its support in a conclusive figure, RS LOOP. This figure becomes the surface to glide upon, the generator of the bildung process to respond to this thesis' question: how to build character in times of radical saturation? RS presents itself as a radically saturated landscape, where ways out and corresponding attitudes may be assembled using its shortcuts and triggers, looping through RS LOOP. RS may be read as a bildungsroman, sprinkled with spoiler alerts, about the bildung process of architects in times of radical saturation.