On World Craft

“If geography is the documentation of the world as it is, then architecture must become World Craft, the craft of making our world. Where our knowledge and technology enables us to surreal dreams into inhabitable space, to turn fiction into fact.”

Instead of adding to the discussion on projective architecture, critical architecture, autonomous architecture, or whatever other form of architecture might have you (because quite frankly I’m extremely confused as to what all these terms might mean), I’d like to touch on the video by BIG and his concept of World Craft. In the video, BIG focuses on this idea of “turning fiction into fact”; which blatantly put means instead of reaffirming the status quo by replicating what is already present in society today we should seek to tweak the status quo to invent what could happen next in order for that to turn into our everyday reality. I think this is an interesting take on the whole purpose of architecture, but it is also a little overly optimistic in my opinion considering the magnitude and plethora of issues we face as architects in this modern day and age. From the numerous examples of work presented during his lecture, it seemed like he was trying to make the point that you don’t have to remain faithful to a single idea, but rather you can marry multiple ideas into a sort of “promiscuous hybrid”, but is this not what modern architecture already is today?

“A city has a beginning, but it has no end, it’s a work in progress, always waiting for new scenes to be and new characters to move in.”

However, one idea that his lecture did seem to enforce that I believe strongly in is that architecture can very much be compared to the art of storytelling. If you really think about it and break down the components of any successful novel or work of architecture they all seem to consist of:

• Characters, or in this case the client, stakeholders, or general public that will be affected by the project
• A Setting, or the context and environment in which the building must be integrated to
• A Conflict, or the design problem at hand which is often a result of the constraints and regulations placed on a project
•  A Plot, or the design process and how you go about finding a solution to the conflict
• And lastly the Resolution, which is the final design which should fit the whole story and theme of the plot

Honestly, I have found that this is the easiest way to really simply explain to an outsider, or just a normal person, who doesn’t fully grasp our purpose or what architecture is about the true goal of architecture.