Course and workshops co-directed with Barbara Bestor.
Poster Graphic Design: Franko Rosas
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The contaminated Architecture Research Salon began as a graduate thesis preparation course at Woodbury University. Though, it always aspired to something that could break into or outside of the classroom.
It operates on a conflation of the architecture thesis with architecture research and on an appreciation of architecture research – whether academic or professional – as a vital, but underestimated, territory. Architecture research, in contrast with architecture practice, is an inherently plural realm of questioning and experimentation. The founding goal of the contaminated Architecture Research Salon was to formulate a flexible, but repeatable, structure for both enabling and guiding multivalent architecture research.
Its umbrella framework is a cooperative set of exercise sequence options, wherein each sequence aligns with one of a spectrum of design methodologies that range from the intuitively to the logically motivated. All paths meet in benchmark progress-sharing moments, with the expectations for which distilled from outputs adaptable or common to the various approaches.
Individual research, then, is punctuated by contaminated Architecture Research Salon workshops – collective reminders of audience, context, and intention. Herein, interdisciplinary experts – in communications, archiving and curation, exhibitions and installations, performance, and storytelling – situate architecture research in dialogue with its means and its ends.
2013 workshop guests
Sean Donahue
Rae Dubow
Kendall Haven
Nicholas Olsberg
Heather Peterson
Tom Wiscombe
2014 workshop guests
Frank Clementi
Peter Culley
Rae Dubow
Sarah Lorenzen
Sam Lubell
Nicholas Olsberg
Kevin Rice
Marcel Sanchez-Prieto
Roger Sherman