Ephraim Joris :

“Lost in space” is a two week workshop in October 2008, repeated in 2009, at Canterbury School for Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.

Work produced through this workshop will be exhibited at the Spontaneous Schooling Exhibition, 18 - 23 June 2010
Opening Event 18 June, 6 - 11pm, Roundtable discussion on workshops 6 - 7pm
Please check www.nousgallery.com for opening times and directions.

Lost in space is a project set-up combining two seemingly unrelated creative environments as the place where students explore notions of spatial composition.
For the duration of two weeks, students underwent training in contemporary dance as part of a spatial design studio. The contemporary dance / design studio, led by Maltese choreographer Sandra Mifsud, Riet Eeckhout and Ephraim Joris, served as an arena for experimentation appropriating stage 2 students in Interior Architecture & Design to study the relationships between inhabitants and their physical and cultural environment. As part of the contemporary dance training, students developed series of choreographic studies (using their own body) exploring bodily compositions in space. This in clear relation to the conception and development of personal diagrams capturing and encoding these movements on ‘paper’. In preparation for the drawing of such diagrams, students recorded their choreographic studies through the medium of video and photography, editing this footage through a variety of postproduction software.
The project “Lost in space” sets out an investigation in new ways of exploring space and thus new ways of ‘drawing’ space. It deals with aspects of the cinematographic as addressed by Paul Virilio. This workshop was specifically designed to deploy students in a situation where they had to question their vocabulary of spatiality. As they explored aspects of movement and choreographic composition, they developed the skills and understanding to record, not only phenomenological space, but also spatial performance through the construction of diagrams; engaging with personal annotation systems capturing the ‘unstable image’ to complement more classical annotation systems implicit to architectural drawing.
Due to the overlapping disciplinary trajectories taken by the students, their thinking process started to show signs of conceptual shifts altering paths of thinking/designing during both, moments of spatial performance (choreographic studies using their own body) and moments of capturing this performance through diagramming. In this particular context (i.e. at the start of their second year of study) the dance studio was merely used as a ‘didactic slingshot maneuver’ aiming to set up a supporting structure for students to rework habitual approaches relative to the subject of research and design.

The material outcome has been very divers and very different over the two years we held the workshop. More importantly however is the knowledge generated and its impact on student performance on the course. For example; Lilly Drolsum (image above), one of the participating students, developed a very particular drawing language unlocking a research interest that informed the rest of her academic career. She did continue to develop her spatial design agenda with a clear focus on the description of an interior through the performance of the human body. ‘Trace Space’, one of her propositions for the design of an interior, appropriates the double act of siting the notion of place in time and space. ‘Trace Space’ defines itself as a case study preoccupied with exploring basic forms of orientation in ‘time-space’ and what impact this might have on the design of places. ‘Trace Space’ investigates the mnemonics of place, as a recording of a personal presence, allowing the observer to step out of his or her own presence to become the observed, perhaps appropriating an almost ‘self inflicted cubism’. Here photographs and prints simultaneously perform as analysis and proposition; measur¬ing choreographically defined qualities of place and describing kinetic representations closely related to its occupant’s performance.

With projects such as ‘Lost in Space’ students learn to critically assess the status of drawing. For example; Anna Baranowska (image below), developed particular ways of drawing to engage with projects such ‘Domestic Superimposition’ a design and description of the concept home. With her installation she illustrates the operation of her design to be closely related to “visual thinking” as described for example by Rudolph Arnheim and Robert H McKim.
This “visual thinking”, manifest in a variety of ways and expressed through a selection of media engages with the mapping of the different localities she lived in throughout her life. With the aim to interiorize a notion of home she conceptualizes, through obsessive drawing, the domestic interior beyond phenomenological space and describes a place that only exists in time.
With the development of this type of work students such as Anna Baranowska meander between the use of classical representational tools in line with architectural professional codes and more perceptive tools for examination using different media from different disciplines. This instigates interdisciplinary practice, important to appropriate an exploration/study of space through different notions of inspection. Objective observations towards the physical and technological are complemented with more sensual/subjective observations towards the sensorial and emotional to enable a critical dialogue between that which might be categorized as scientific or ‘object-driven’ and that which might be developed through experience, coincidence and error.
This nurtures an interesting questioning of the notion of ‘professionalism’ particular to spatial practice. As much as professional codes do provide the organizational support for our spatial practices, strategically superimposed ‘moments’ of ‘avoiding’ professional codes of representation to invest in ‘other languages’ seems to enable a shift from using drawing as a purely representational tool, to using drawing as a way of thinking.

This type of curriculum, particular to interior practice, aims to resist the idea of the interior to be located within the confines of pre-existing containers; as mere details to architecture. Within this physical confinement seems to lay (not always but often) the reason for conceptual and critical imprisonment nurturing an attitude towards the non-relational, the inherent and the singular.
With projects such as ‘Lost in Space’, this confinement of the interior as a phenomenological entity wants to be broken, setting up a supporting structure for designers to use their discipline, not only to identify with but question their actions and thus individual positions within the profession. This type of project work announces an attitude towards interior architecture and design where the discipline is used as a platform for questioning spatial practice. It does what architectural education has to fight for; act as a radical entity; not focused on defining its discipline yet focused on perpetually shifting the boundaries of its own disciplinary province to appropriate new and more engaging relational conditions with neighboring practices.