“Bricolage may be, quite simply, the making of things in the full and liberating awareness of how little we know”
Irenee Scalbert
Repair and re-use are central to bricolage and will form the basis for the studio’s work this year. We will work with an existing building and transforming it with what we have around us. Short-term improvisation will be amplified to include longer-term strategies, speculating over years, generations and perhaps even longer. The process of re-using an existing building invokes history – we are not the first, second or even third people to inhabit this building. The layers of history will provide as much of the material for the work as the physical reality of existing structures. Bricolage therefore is a question of limits and process more than anything else.
Bricolage is best known as the French word which incorporates several terms for making things through improvisation; DIY, tinkering, repair or making do and getting by. It is often associated with scarcity and amateurism and as such it has an awkward relationship to ‘high’ architecture and contemporary consumer led production. However bricolage is also about the freedom afforded by constraints. Imagination and invention are born of bricolage where the limitation set by the context is the channel to new modes of thinking.
The tradition of bricolage is perhaps the oldest and most human of activities predating even language. The tradition in modern society is especially strong and can be found in architecture, art, technology and warfare. Marcel Duchamp and the Wright Brothers worked through a parallel process of re-inventing ordinary objects in the early days of the twentieth century. Over half a century later Arte Povera and NASA were simultaneously conquering nature and space through improvisation empirical experiments.
Repair and re-use are central to bricolage and will form the basis for the studio’s work this year. We will work with an existing building and transforming it with what we have around us. Short-term improvisation will be amplified to include longer-term strategies, speculating over years, generations and perhaps even longer. The process of re-using an existing building invokes history – we are not the first, second or even third people to inhabit this building. The layers of history will provide as much of the material for the work as the physical reality of existing structures. Bricolage therefore is a question of limits and process more than anything else.
Chisenhale
The site is a former veneer factory in a residential neighbourhood in Bow, east London. It currently houses three existing arts organizations besides and above the derelict production hall: the Chisenhale Gallery, on the ground floor next door to the main production hall, is the only space currently open to the public while artist studios occupy the upper floors. Above the hall is Chisenhale Dance Space. These three organizations will form the basis for the programme and can be seen as clients. We will encourage relations with all or some of the people who use the building.
The buildings are part of a complex neighbourhood and proposals will be developed in relation to the area and the city beyond. While the physical space is constrained the reach of the project should not be underestimated.
Process
The studio will continue its primary concern with the physical modeling to develop spatial and tectonic strategies at an urban and architectural scale. Models will range from rough corrugated cardboard and glue gun assemblies to extremely ambitious and refined constructions. Each time, the model will serve as the site for investigating the architectural project and they will also present their own physical and material challenges. The work will emphasise the duality between the model as miniature building and its presence as an artifact in its own space. In essence the process of making, photographing and experiencing the models has a latent spatiality along side the more traditional aspect of architectural representation.
We will also develop a parallel process of digital modeling addressing issues unavailable in physical models. The digital modeling will add other descriptions in relation to scale, geometry and analysis.
Small projects
Cardboard Banquet
We will start the year with by making a structure and an event. We will work as a group to create a structure of shelter out of cardboard to host a banquet for the first year students on 23 October. The entire project will be made of one material – cardboard (sponsored by SCA Packaging). First year students will make the furniture for the event. The project will start on Friday 9 October when product designer and former architect Rentaro Nishimura will lead a cardboard design workshop exploring the possibilities structural folding.
This will be our first piece of bricolage.
Bees, cliffs and parametric bricolage
We have been invited by contemporary art centre Raven Row to participate in a three day workshop led by LA based artist David Hullfish Bailey who is currently exhibiting a new installation in the gallery. The workshop, which will include walks, mapping, discussion and making on the subject of context, history and technology. Five students from the studio will join five more fine art students from the RCA.