Let’s Practice!

Advanced questions of practice work on the deeper layers of meaning, representation and rhetoric related to architecture. These modes of inquiry, curiosity and desire have profoundly shaped and informed the major events and shifts of both the architectural discipline and profession. Whether working directly on the artifacts of architectural practice (buildings, interiors, furniture), the mediums (drawing, models, video), the rhetoric (writings, lectures, exhibitions), the culture (organization, diversity, style, taste) or pure experimentation, the significant and important architectural practices have all contributed in some way to advancing architecture and “steering the ship”. As general culture shifts into a post-medium and post-digital set of conditions and concerns, new questions are emerging as to what architectural practice means and how it might transform and evolve to remain relevant and even to exert influence.

For the degree project studio each student established an invented “practice” as newly imagined entities with names, policies, directives, positions, mediums, styles, etc. The group of practices is designed within the MOCA Geffen warehouse galleries as part of a speculative “2020 exhibition” focused on young architectural practices. The practices are designed to be both fully operational and to display their inner workings to a larger audience of architects and museum-goers, thus the design of how the practices are observed and experienced becomes part of the design problem.