Situated Architecture

The research group Situated Architecture recognises that the experience of architecture is bound to “situations”, which architecture both articulates and produces. The consideration of these situations includes material cultures, languages, representation, and a multitude of framings and mediations. The issue of a situated architecture demands inquiry into the complex nature of the conditions of its appearances and of its experience. This research group takes the notion of situated experience as a common ground between academia and practice; as a topic to explore both conceptually and through material and building practice.

Experiencing: Perception of Place

Exploring the complexities of the experience of place and architecture, giving privilege to phenomena––such as material, mass, light, and space––and the specific effects of cultures on architecture and the environment, its materialisations and expressions. The specific solutions, conventions, arrangements, and fantasies inscribed in places are all constituent elements of experience.

Narrating: Language and Representation

Investigating the relationship between the physical reality of place and the way it is imagined and expressed. We sue reflections on oral history, narrative, literary imagination and everyday spatial practices as lenses to reflect on how architecture is situated: not only in terms of its physical connection to place, but also socially and culturally.

Making: Material Culture

Ideas find themselves translated into atmospheric, spatial and material phenomena and expressions of material culture. Material culture refers to the ideas of culture(s) that are embedded in things, in artefacts: objects, interiors, places, buildings, cities; in their arrangements; in the ways they are made; in their appearances and the language of those appearances. Analyses of situated architecture are deeply indebted to how one interacts with the world through things.