To Project

For some reason, everyone else seems to know what “projective architecture” is enough to talk about so for my own sake of trying to understand what exactly it is and why it’s called “projective”, I’ll have my blogpost be my quest for the truth. So what is projective architecture? Let me, the person who has yet to know, enlighten you.

To be projective is to extend outward. That much makes sense. When something projects, it’s usually by a force acting on it. In my head, I’m imagining one of those squishy stress balls that once you (the exterior force) engages with it, the stress ball reacts and therefore projects in response to what its environment is doing to it. I think projective architecture has the same concept behind it with the forces being the context, human scale, perception, materiality, “multiple economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups.” The list can go on.

Projective architecture can be argued that it is, in fact, a kind of architecture that everyone needs. It’s “cool,” it’s contextual, and definitely not critical. It understands the person, its environment and its needs. There is a sense of engagement that parallels the Doppler Effect. As Whiting and Somol so eloquently put it, “Doppler [architecture] focuses upon the effects and exchanges of architecture's inherent multiplicities: material, program, writing, atmosphere, form, technologies, economics, etc.”

I think that is why everyone else seems so in favor of projective architecture. It gives the people what they need in this overlapping form and program design, like the WW's IntraCenter. It articulates the possibility of multiple engagements rather than responding to a single formal identification.