Mark Rakatansky: Performative Interplay in Architecture

Guest lecture TUE 27.11.2007 | 19:00 h |

A cooperation between the Institute for Art and Architecture (IKA) and the Department for Art and Media (Ordinariat für Kunst und Medien)

Repeated proclamations of the death of narrative in architecture to the contrary, spatial stories both intentional and inadvertent continue to persist and evolve. The forms of discourse that have emerged in recent decades with the advent of digital developments in architecture — performative design, emergent behavior, responsive iterative systems, adaptive programming, animate dynamics — may be understood as a series of narrative strands circulating around the ability to perform differential adaptations to a range of internal and external forces. If this discourse has yet to coalesce after two decades it is in a large part due to this very denial of narrative, this persistent attempt to bracket out narratives of site, program, and material character. Compared this to the advent of digital narrative in programming where, say, the initial abstract modeling of flocking behaviors by Craig Reynolds (in 1986) lead within just one year to increasingly intelligent and responsive models precisely by introducing narrative into the modeling, narratives of context, of material, of behaviors, of character.

Every other performative media understands this interplay well, and thus instead of bracketing out narrative, are constantly evolving new ways to draw it forth, playing with and against it at the same time. By focusing on the performative capabilities of design, architecture can enact how design elements develop as characters as they engage in and through their particular spatial scenes and stories.

Mark Rakatansky is an Architect and Designer. He is a Professor at Columbia University, Pratt Institut and Parsons. He holds a BA from the University of California-Santa Cruz and an M.Arch from UC Berkeley. Selected Publications include: ANY, A+U, Assemblage, Camerawork, Harvard Architecture Review, Art New England, Sharawadgi. Awards from: Emerging Voices, I.D. Annual, National Art and Design Competition for Street Trees, 100 Annual, PRINT, Progressive Architecture.