Productive/Disruptive Conference^W030

Tessa travelled to Cardiff, Wales to present and participate in the Association of Architecture Educators conference: Productive-Disruptive: spaces of exploration in-between architectural pedagogy and practice.

Tessa presented her PhD research and practice, at that time framed through the lens of ‘troubling architecture’ (which you can read about here) and facilitated an embodied performance of one of its events – a workshop co-developed by Tessa, Maxine Goon and Simon. This event, a reworked version of The Decorative Art of Tomorrow Today Defining, Documenting and Demystifying Documentation workshop hosted in 2022, invited the students and educators in participation to consider the ‘Studio Brief’ as a contract document between student and teacher.

Contracts are increasingly ubiquitous. The workshop argued for their role as the present day analogue of centuries of ritual experimentation. It invited attendees to consider the transactional relationships they exist within and how these might be reimagined. Treated as a site for experimentation, provocation and potential, the contract was offered as something that can generate other modes of behaviour and consciousness. Deployed in architecture practice and pedagogy, a contract can reshape anything from a course syllabus, to the agreement for architectural design services, to our commitments as practitioners to each other, the planet and to ourselves. Viewed through this lens, the contract was theorised as a tool to trouble normative modes of relating, working, being. The contract is simultaneously the boundary, the ‘gap’ between, and an opportunity space for a reimagined discipline.

You can read the optimistic and entertaining studio briefs that attendees produced here.