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This year PG17 explored Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and the potential of his philosophy of language and ethics in architecture. Dialogism is determined by the capacity of an author to integrate other positions of self and unresolvable dialogues in their work. Many of our limitations in making a caring, enjoyable and sustainable world, both as architects and as citizens, can be overcome by developing and using creative processes that are truly dialogic.
Architects engage with a vast spectrum of environments and are asked to accommodate an unending array of different desires and needs. Responding to this complex reality, we have become sceptical of monologues and the monologic design narratives that dominate our discipline and profession; instead, we aim to practice as dialogical architects. The dialogical architect fosters an empathic self who attends to manifold perspectives, cultures and histories, even when these are contradictory, and who embodies multiple positions and counter-positions within a single project.
We have sited our projects in Porto and the Douro Valley, responding to a range of individual interests: prehistory and the fossil fuel age; river and coast ecologies; stone assemblages; architectural ceramics; purification in housing; migrating communities; scripting histories; sound in architecture; unfinished building; mental health and the representation of multiple realities; mobile structures; and the life cycles of materials. Each project is research-based and constructs an architectural thesis that is explicitly manifested in the design proposition. The proposed buildings are contextual and interplay with the social and political facets of place. Iteration, experimentation and improvisation are balanced by traditions and continuities.
In addition, this year we developed a one-day drawing project together with students and staff from the Porto School of Architecture, also known as FAUP. Our shared work, called ‘Drawing in Dialogue’, explored how the buildings and landscapes of FAUP, designed by Álvaro Siza, have been populated by multiple intentions and experiences during the last 40 years. We responded to FAUP’s stories – told by the gardener, the carpenter, the engineer, the historian, the architect, the teacher and the student – with numerous hand drawings, the making of a collaborative intersectional topography and a machine learning drawing process.
Another collaboration was “On-site”, an experimental study by Anton and Vilius, investigating the potential of found waste material.