Making Things Complicated: About Materially Afforded Negotiation Processes and their Contribution to the Construction of Knowledge

In this paper, I explore aspects of the complex poetic movement back and forth in between architectural materializations and thought, as a key process towards knowing. The poetic here in its notion of “a making”: the design designing, reconciling thought with matter and time, and people with the world. Poetic architecture then being a productive lens through which we perceive and experience the world. Venturing from a concrete architectural practice, CoMa02, I argue for designing confusion and contingency into the interaction between artefacts and users, provoking thought to unfold. I suggest that infecting the mechanism of “affordances” with the mechanisms of “dissensus” and “agonism” invites new knowledge to come into being, through the specificity of each experience compared to an archive of personal experiences.

ISBN:9789081323864

Publication year:2013