The National

3 Crowns Resource Consent

2011-12-07T18:19:00.002+13:00

Although the office has been through a transition period work is still moving forward on 3 Crowns and the rc was recently sent to Queenstown so it could be put together with the planners evaluation. The design is a reflection of the land surrounding the site: this is a unique and elegant landscape flanked by mountains, valleys, lake, rivers, vineyards, and orchards. The vernacular language of Otago was drawn upon for materiality making stone a natural choice for the southern face of the building reflecting on the history of the Otago cottage, contrasting this will be the northern facade which acts as a mirror for the landscape and the views towards the north, east, and west.

Images to come...

Been away for a while

2011-12-07T18:08:00.002+13:00

This has not been an easy year for myself or the office, there have been many changes, relocation's, a sad loss after a short fight with a terrible disease, constant unnerving earthquakes and the loss of business, confidence and the ability to recover and move forward.

The office has left Christchurch and hopes to one day return to contribute to the rebuild, but for now nao has moved to Auckland. So this is now the future, lets see what we can achieve.

Christchurch City

2011-05-07T14:09:00.006+12:00

Catastrophe city:

“Catastrophe is the mathematical description of the nature of change that produces discontinuity between forms of organization.”

Rem Koolhaas AV Monographs Sept-Oct 2007

Some of you will be aware that the University of Auckland will be running Architectural Design 6 and Advanced Design 2 studios on Christchurch and that I will be involved in a teaching role for the Architecture School, this has given me time to look over the damage (both infrastructural, architectural, psychological, and personal) and ask objectively what direction will this city take, or what will determine the future of this city; will it be a city built on fear? A city of hope? A utopia or dystopia?

“One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. This relationship between the locus and the citizenry becomes the cities predominant image…”

Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City

The sudden and violent removal of the city fabric has what affect on the city itself? Is a city merely the sum of the parts? If so then what are the repercussions of the removal of those parts? If the city is the collected memory of ourselves, then when the city is damaged or removed what effect does that have on the citizenry? Is our identity altered because the city no longer reflects who we believed ourselves to be? Or is the question for Christchurch: was that ever the case? Did the city represent its citizens? Did it have an identity?

Are objects the containers for our conscious? Do the signs represent what is signified?

We are currently at the point where we can collectively alter the fabric of the city, we can imply suggestions that the city may accept or reject, but to alter that fabric we must first understand the city in its entirety, and currently we do not.

If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories of potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnamable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new, only about the more and the modified. It will not be about the civilized, but about the underdevelopment. Since it is out of control, the urban is about to become a major vector of the imagination. Redefined, urbanism will not only, or mostly be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists. We were making sandcastles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away.

Rem Koolhaas, Whatever happened to urbanism? Pg 969 – 971 SMLXL 1994

Territories of potential

Business zones, residential zones, research and development zones, high tech zones, international zones, cultural zones, environmental zones, educational zones, and utopian points are these territories of potential, areas that can accommodate multiple possibilities

“For it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it”

Felix Deleuze and Gilles Gauttari A Thousand Plateaus

more to come

3 Crowns Cottage Wanaka

2011-03-07T17:02:00.006+13:00

A 3 bedroom house for a cherry and apricot orchard in Wanaka, more to come on this one, and something to come on the Christchurch earthquake, just some thoughts, maybe my 2 cents...

Barn, black and white

2010-08-09T11:40:00.004+12:00

It looks like the barn is almost finished, the client has moved in and it looks busy, full and lived in, not like the architecture you see in most magazines. There is a sense of achievement seeing something that was visualised as a clean object being occupied in such a haphazard, eclectic fashion, it feels alive, definitely not a machine for living, half a house half a stable, but somehow this does not feel like its mine any more, my ownership is maybe in the pride that it is done, perhaps finished, not quite sure...

535 Worcester St

2010-08-05T16:56:00.003+12:00

5 Low cost housing units in Christchurch... more to come...

Perriam Cove Cottage

2010-06-25T11:13:00.005+12:00

A 5 bedroom house to be built in three stages in Central Otago, I'm not entirely sure if this counts as one cottage, really it feels more like two crossed over each other, but it does have an attic and not a second floor.

Auckland Waterfront Entry

2010-03-24T14:34:00.010+13:00

This was our entry for the wharf competition on the Auckland waterfront, an area that is close to my heart. Somehow throughout my childhood the waterfront was a constant, whether it was a trip to the Custom House to watch pantomime and buy books, or going to Down Town with my Grandmother, Mother and Aunt, to have club sandwiches and tea, or later on in life getting off the Devonport ferry before a night out and going to the duty free shops pretending to be tourists and covering ourselves in aftershave, attempting to pass ourselves off as sophisticated young men for the nights debauchery.

The waterfront of Auckland is now a battle ground, too many generals, or too many cooks are waging war, or baking furiously, all it seems are paying little attention to each other, charging forward without clearly knowing where forward is, preparing a grand banquet for a picnic.

The brief called for everything, when really was anything needed? We opted for a program-less building, a container for cultures, not the identifier of one, an object that could be assimilated in to the diverse culture that is Auckland. Something that could be anything, need a gallery, can be accommodated, need a cruise ship terminal, we'll fit that in, restaurants, shopping, duty free, cafes, public spaces for all events, all there. An icon is never intentionally an icon, what we offer is a celebration.

First Barn images of the year

2010-02-09T09:20:00.001+13:00

About a month off the finish now

Last images for the Year... Bring on 2010

2009-12-26T20:01:00.005+13:00

Roofs On!!!!!

2009-12-10T16:31:00.002+13:00

"The Barn" Steel up roof going on

2009-11-25T22:13:00.003+13:00

Wellington Waterfront Competition

2009-11-25T19:16:00.005+13:00

Debbie Nuthal Residence, "The Barn" Frames up

2009-11-03T13:15:00.005+13:00

Frames in, steel up, other steel measured up, roof to go soon.

Frames up, steel going in.

Barn Update, Nuthal Residence, Construction

2009-09-24T14:56:00.004+12:00

New Images of the Barn, slab being poured frames going up Friday.

Block work in place, starting to get somewhere.

Update

2009-07-18T15:39:00.002+12:00

Work in progress

The barn has gone in for consent (in Oz that would be planning) and all is looking good for construction to start at the end of this month.
We have been commissioned to do a fit-out for an existing restaurant in Christchurch (very early planning stages at the moment).
And this week should be travelling down to Queenstown to discuss redesigning an existing motel façade, lobby, and car park.

Cheers N

Tutto Bene Extension (Bird Cage)

2009-06-25T16:31:00.020+12:00

Details: this is a proposed addition for a restaurant in Christchurch, initially the brief was to look at a new outdoor eating area, covered, possibly open air, but increasing the available eating area. A new eating area in this location called for something against the existing which is a poor example of late 90's property boom building. The sites location to the building, existing landscape (which is partly council maintained), and orientation to sunlight called for a lite structure and well lit structure. So they became the the initial driving factors...So bring on the Italians...

Oamaru House (Test House)

2009-06-08T13:42:00.025+12:00

Three quarters there, almost. This house feels like a tribute, or maybe a trumpet, or bebop, somehow improvised yet grounded, maybe like de Bord cutting and rearranging as he pleases and then seeing where it takes him.

This house seems to be a testimony to my education, in and out of school, classrooms and bars, lecture theatres and pubs, studios and office lunches. Perhaps this is the testing ground that was spoken of by those in the know, that the house is the testing ground for all our theories, somehow I doubt that. But I do know that this is where the collaboration happens, admittedly mostly between modernists, but then what is disagreeable with modernism?

This house is Mies, Phillip, Alvar, Marcel, Robin, Roy, Holyoake, it is petrified of glass, has its history based in the city, is deliriously not New York, is the extra small missing from SMLXL, and it could never be the architecture of tomorrow. But it is the collaboration of histories smashing together, binding, sticking, sliding to create purpose...

More to come..

Barn Update, Nuthal Residence

2009-05-14T16:10:00.007+12:00

We have a site, its about 30 minutes outside of Christchurch in West Melton, and very close to a good vineyard. So the buildings are now into documentation with construction (tentatively) aiming for the end of July (perhaps not the best time of year to build, but still pretty exciting). The building has now been extended to include a separate barn increasing the scope of the project, the house itself is still divided into stables and a house. More is sure to come...

Pecha Kucha: Christchurch Domestic Terminal

2009-04-02T11:46:00.022+13:00

Text to arrive shortly

Debbie Nuthal Residence, "The Barn"

2009-04-02T09:38:00.012+13:00

A mixed use building for rural Christchurch, containing a house at one end and horse stables at the other. The specifics of the brief created a set of guiding fundamentals, a modular unit, a central entry, a very high entry (due to horse float and horse and rider), and a modest budget. Using 1940's, 50's and 60's New Zealand modernism as a starting point, buildings like the Brinkshaw House, the First and Second Group Houses, as well as 1950's Californian modernism, were referenced in the creation, elaborating on the modernist traditions and reworking them to accommodate new programs and adaptable uses (eventually if desired the barn section can be altered to become living areas) .

Currently under documentation. With construction starting in mid 2009

2009-01-25T15:51:00.005+13:00

above: Panorama of Paul Pascoe's Christchurch Airport Terminal. The current airport has undergone an extensive number of alterations such that the interior is almost unrecognisable in contemporary photos. To the right can be seen the Architects Shepperd and Rout's elegant International Terminal building that cleverly and decisively amends itself to Pascoe's building. (click for a larger view)

Making sense of what it is: collaboration as such

The future demolition of Paul Pascoe’s 1956 Christchurch Airport Terminal by The Christchurch Airport Authority, to be replaced by a monstrous proposal by the New Zealand architectural office of Warren and Mahoney in collaboration with the Australian architectural office of Hassall exhibits a cruel understanding of architecture’s civic role - one that should not be limited to a discourse on the importance of Pascoe’s place in the history of design in New Zealand – in its verbosity rendered built only.

What constitutes a civic architecture is the collaborative continual sense making that awards its built form a place in any history. As such, it is not the destruction of the airports built form that is at the heart of the issue but for the airport to remain a site for continual sense making. Civic-ness is a question of how the architect can locate an alternative to knowledge sourced creativity bound in historical models of consequence. The Christchurch architect Peter Beaven briefly made reference to Paul Pascoe in an answer to a question put to him by Tony Van Raat who asked Beaven to pinpoint the moment when he decided he wanted to become an architect to which Beaven responded:

Well, one day during the early part of the war we were down in Sumner and I saw this bloke standing there – Paul Pascoe – and there he was, big tie, looking out to sea like Milton or something, you know, seeing poetry ... and he said to me, “Ah, young Beaven, what are you thinking of doing?” and I said “Well, I don't know really, I'm trying to be told”. He said “Come in to the office with me”. So we got on the tram and went in to his office and within two hours talking Paul Pascoe somehow made clear what I'd seen, who I was, what I should do.

Two hours with Paul, that was it. Pascoe was the one. He was a charismatic fellow who knew something that architects are not taught: that architecture was a mystery and a huge psychic need that people had to have. It's a performance.[1]

The young Beaven’s Alice-in-Wonderland-like answer of not really knowing but doing his best to be told exhibits Beaven’s response of not knowing as a possible legitimate alternative to knowledge sourced creativity. Further still, Beaven and Pascoe’s collaborative sense making offers another way of conceiving a model of making with that constitutes the premise of not knowing the answer to a question of ‘what’ which affords architecture its civic role.

The Philosopher Gilles Deleuze has commented that the outcomes of his efforts studying other philosophers amounts to a “sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception”. Deleuze conceives an image of himself “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.”[2] Taking the dominant position and acknowledging an immaculate conception as the result of his transgressive act, Deleuze opens up the categorization of his offspring to the monstrous. However, as Marie-Hélène Huet explains, by the 19th Century monstrosity was no longer what defined a monster alone, but was instead, a measure of what could not be explained yet by experimentation laid out according to categories of monstrosities further classified by their level of complexity. Of these classifications, monstrosity was included as a sub-category.[3] Far from conceiving a ‘proper’ model of collaboration whose monstrous quality could be assessed and used to illustrate a protestant [4] model of coherence, collaborative strategies render apparent the intentional contradictions when faced with not knowing acknowledged by Deleuze as an immaculate conception.

Consequently, Deleuze’s collaborative efforts make parody of its own means in systems that create comparative expressions of inoperativeness, wherein a closed space exists of arbitrary actions on the part of the accessory who remains in the dark concerning their role in any outcome produced, and the open space of contemporary modes of assemblage that engage the shifting mix of inter-multi-trans-referential prefixes into coherent and incoherent configurations. Within Deleuze’s concept of an immaculate conception resides a collaborative process sought in the portrayal of an outcome between two party’s without the other party having any knowledge of their collaborative role, something that is akin to ‘making a baby behind ones back’. Deleuze subsequently opens himself to the possibility of having his way with the other philosophers and not knowing an outcome that is produced as the result of his pleasures. As Deleuze comments further, “the child was bound to be monstrous too, because, it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions.” [5] The resulting emissions from Deleuze’s complicity in the onanistic pleasure provided by the act are exploited by the other party. Hidden from him, he unknowingly becomes a collaborateur.

Models of collaborative expression that cannot be foreseen or attested to by existing bodies of knowledge to have clear and comparable outcomes that are the result of a collaborative investigative process, or at the least are able to be subject to critique within existing accepted models of knowing and expression, find themselves excluded because their coherence remains irreconcilable with existing models of rationality. Able to classify the result of his buggery as monstrous, Deleuze however raises another question of how one makes sense of the collaborative act if implicated as a silent accomplice by not knowing the result outright. The collaborative act makes sense only if it is successful in finding a level of coherence. On account of their affective inconsistencies, collaborative strategies that enable everything to be laid on the same page amount to a rhetorical game of persuading someone outside the game that the idealization it presents, in all its looseness, a level of coherence. Pursuant to Deleuze’s ‘shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions’ to the firmness of the hold to one another, to the stickyness of the participants parts, what decides a valid means of coherence “seems to be the degree of “firmness” involved in the act of sticking.” [6]

As Sianne Ngai has expressed, coherence has always been understood as a “fixed idea of order dictating in advance how particles might be moulded or organized, rather than a particular activity or becoming by which things are brought together, made into some order.” [7] Coherence that is orientated by this assumption is pointed out by Sylviane Agacinski as being incorrect as “those who share are also divided among themselves.” [8] There is no singular determinate ‘we’ that could give form to a coherence named after the fact of the coming together of separate parts. However, sense must be made; not of a form alone, but by an action of forming organised around the opening-up of self-questioning to the receptiveness of others. Collaboration is paramount to an agent’s freedom and to the action of creativity that includes not only others but themselves. Consequently a forming agent interrogates what it is through the questioning of its collaborative freedom, by putting the question of coherence to itself – playing Deleuze’s insightful and blind participants concurrently. Collaboration is situated in an agent’s formal gesture of an address that confounds the ability of the agent to respond, such that, the sudden and confounding knowledge of any outcome conceived by the agent’s own pleasure amounts not to agent’s new found responsibility or obligation after the fact to what is conceived, but to a questioning of the agent’s own creativity and sense making in the action of conceiving what it is.

Irit Rogoff in her essay accompanying the exhibition A.C.A.D.E.M.Y, attests to sometimes having no idea what to say, when existing structured knowledge does not offer her the means to negotiate a newly discovered path of expression.[9] Subsequently Rogoff’s expression of ill-comprehension as a legitimate recourse to a model of collaboration and of an economy of knowing is excluded. Much like Rogoff’s not-knowing, the agent’s question regarding what it is ultimately surprises the agent by the fact “that a question should get through [ to it ] at all.” [10] It is not an agent that instigates the question derived from a collaborative action, rather, the collaborative agent emerges through the lived experience of its foundations in the question of what it is. As such, a coherence that would account for what a collaborative process includes or excludes is engendered in the material process of the making of what it is.

For Agacinski, the question of what it is as an expression of incoherence is “a shared weakness,” defined as the agent’s “experience that the subjectum hides itself and that the existent is not therefore its own subject.” [11] The agent deceives itself into not only answering a question of what it is, but believes that what it is is conceived from without rather than from its origin within – an affair that leads to a sonorous conception. As such, weakness is the actual of the irreducible betweeness of a collaborative act that requires the agent to use all possible means as a support for what it is. Agacinski writes:

to relate to the body of the other as an object that can be used, that one can instrumentalise or think of as a means, is a way for subjective consciousness to reappropriate this outside, to prevent the other’s flesh from infringing on its own, to prevent its ‘own’ body from spilling over onto another’s.[12]

At stake is the agent’s ‘stickyness’ and ‘firmness’, borne out as a shared surprise in the question put to it subsequently finding itself responsible to another; “by chance someone else’s support.”[13] The proleptic function of the interrogative pronoun what is contemporaneous with an agent who finds themselves a support for another. By representing to oneself all the possible objections and answers in anticipation of the answer becoming applicable the agent may know how to prevent itself from loosing control and conversely attest to a level of coherence. Agacinski writes that, “responsibility is conceived of from the perspective of a new experience of the question, which is also a new determination of freedom, insofar as the question is the decision that most properly belongs to spirit and its freedom.“[14] The question of what it is that is put forth is neither a plea for the means of its own awareness, or a question that identifies what it speaks to, such that a level of coherence that would attest to a collaborative act after the fact could be demonstrated. The question of what it is cannot express knowing what it is. Nevertheless, it can express the experience of the question as the overcoming of uncertainty engendered by objection and complaint and as such provides a stage on which the collaborative effort takes place.

Jan Verwoert shares Agacinski’s emphasis on weakness, describing a model that engenders the proleptic functions of what by seeking to counter the aims of those who would instrumentalise the agent’s collaborative voices. Verwoert asks us to understand our own agency by “claiming the imagination and the aesthetic experience as a field of collective agency where workable forms of resistance can be devised, [ by seeking ] effective forms of non-alignment, non-compliance, uncooperativeness, reluctance, reticence, weariness or unwillingness [ embracing ] the point of exhaustion [by interrupting] the economy of expectations […] producing an empty moment of awareness”.[15] Verwoert’s describes this latency as a “state of convalescence,”[16] the moment after an illness when one is well again but not an active participant – a weakened body. It is during this weakened state that the agent would subsequently “begin to care about life again,”[17] and more importantly instead of claiming the fantasy of selfhood over everything else would “imagine this state of convalescence as a shared condition of experience,” [18] finding themselves surrounded by those equally weakened by illness, as though their voice had been modified by a tuberculoid inflection.

For Jean-Luc Nancy, a model of attesting to an account that cannot be reduced to a unanimous decision of who or what is and is not speaking and what is meant by this account in clear and comparable outcomes that attest to a collaborative proposition, is an urgent contemporary need. Nancy locates his argument in the word ‘art’ and what it may or may not encompass within the contemporeanity of its continual sense making. Nancy argues that while art can be identified in the tangibility of its attributes, no category could define what it is, however, art finds itself in a sense obligated to a unity defined by its practices. Art’s weakness is its position exterior to categorization, yet through the inflections of its different modal variances it nevertheless can be expressed as such as ‘art’.

The inclusive disjunction that all art is met with is the source of Nancy’s earnestness, one that, as he states:

brings forth a desire that is neither the desire for an object nor the desire for a meaning but a desire for feeling and for feeling oneself feel – a desire to experience oneself as irreducible to a signification, to a being or an identity. A desire to enjoy, in sensibility, the very fact that there is no unique and final form in which this desire would reach its end.[19]

Art does not reveal something hidden, instead it fails to manifest itself in a category that could be assailed by critical judgement. For Rogoff, the identification of weaknesses that inhabited critique and criticism marks the sense of the familiar which illuminates the affectual consequences of Nancy’s argument regarding what art is.[20] The origin and subsequent development of the creative act is not only felt, but is an onanistic expression of Verwoerts weakened body; a desire for feeling and for feeling oneself feel.

Consequently, Rogoff locates an alternative to knowledge sourced creativity, in the expressive potential of “how we might know what we don’t yet know how to know”[21] a model Rogoff terms ‘criticality’. Criticality is located away from the assured model of expression-content, whereby what is being expressed is harnessed in what a system acknowledges as the content or form alone, instead “operating from an uncertain ground of actual embeddedness.”[22] Criticality marks a context that is yet to come, nevertheless it remains contingent on the tangibility of its contemporary limits. However, the attributes which exist as a consequence of its contemporary situation cannot define what criticality is. It can not be invoked and then applied to the problem of knowing the result of a collaborative expression of desire, neither can it affix an identity or meaning to the subject who corresponds with the expression according to a critique of what the resulting expression resembles or is separate from. As Brian Massumi suggests, “the highest operation of thought is not to choose, but to harbour and convey that felt force, repotentialised.”[23] Criticality is constituted as such in the contrapuntal specificity of its own dimension.

As such offers ways of suspending the familiar landscape of evaluation that accorded post-structuralism’s and post-modernism’s contemplative protraction, interpellation and reflective edification. Rather than proceeding to know what it is that is being expressed through a reified assessment that would seek to reconcile the model of collaboration with the principles of coherence and incoherence, as such galvanizes that which gave rise to it, the potential of a failure to know, in a returning gesture that at once preempts any question of its claim to coherence and reiterates the underlying rhythm of collaboration in what the agent is expressing. As such provides a stage for the arraignment of what it is. What it is “launches forth, [ and ] hazards an improvisation”[24] incriminated in an emission as such.

Michael Spooner is a Graduate Architect residing in Melbourne Australia. In between visits to his home town of Christchurch, New Zealand he is undertaking a PhD in Architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

[1] Van Raat, Tony, Beaven ... as in Heaven http://www.agm.co.nz/index.html?category=33&id=152 (25.01.09)
[2] Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations: 1972-1990 (trans M Joughin) Columbia University Press: New York. p. 6.
[3] “the teratogenist creates his won field of experimentation, imagines a new experimental domain” Huet, Marie-Hélène (1993) Monstrous Imagination Cambridge and London.: Harvard University Press. P. 116. Refer Chapter 5, Monstrous Father:The Birth of Teratogeny
[4] I am reminded of an entry from André Gide’s journal dated 22 June 1907 that reads: ‘I am merely a little boy having a good time – compounded with a Protestant minister who bores him’, in Gide, André (1947) The Journals of Andre Gidé: Volume 1, 1889-1913 (trans J. O’Brien), London: Secker & Warburg. p. 217
[5] Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations: 1972-1990 (trans M Joughin) Columbia University Press: New York. p. 6.
[6] Ngai, Sianne (2000) ‘Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics’ in Postmodern Culture (Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000) (Accessed 02.06.08) http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/. para. 27
[7] Ngai, Sianne (2000) ‘Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics’ in Postmodern Culture (Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000) (Accessed 02.06.08) http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/ para. 29
[8] Agacinski, Sylviane (1991) ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ in Who Comes After the Subject? (Ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor & J. Nancy), New York & London: Routledge. pp. 9-23, p. 15
[9] Rogoff, Irit, (2006) ‘Academy as Potentiality’ in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (Ed. Nollert, A, Rogoff, I, De Baere, B & et al.) Frankfurt, Germany: Revolver. pp. 13-20, p. 13
[10] Agacinski, Sylviane (1991) ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ in Who Comes After the Subject? (Ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor & J. Nancy), New York & London: Routledge. pp. 9-23, p. 9
[11] Agacinski, Sylviane (1991) ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ in Who Comes After the Subject? (Ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor & J. Nancy), New York & London: Routledge. pp. 9-23, p. 16
[12] Agacinski, Sylviane (1991) ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ in Who Comes After the Subject? (Ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor & J. Nancy), New York & London: Routledge. pp. 9-23, p. 17
[13] Agacinski, Sylviane (1991) ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ in Who Comes After the Subject? (Ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor & J. Nancy), New York & London: Routledge. pp. 9-23, p. 16
[14] Agacinski, Sylviane (1991) ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ in Who Comes After the Subject? (Ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor & J. Nancy), New York & London: Routledge. pp. 9-23, p. 19
[15] Verwoert, Jan (2007) “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform” in Dot Dot Dot, no.15, Oct-Nov, pp.90-112. Pg. 92-93
[16] Verwoert, Jan (2007) “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform” in Dot Dot Dot, no.15, Oct-Nov, pp.90-112. Pg. 110 [17] Verwoert, Jan (2007) “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform” in Dot Dot Dot, no.15, Oct-Nov, pp.90-112. Pg. 110 [18] Verwoert, Jan (2007) “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform” in Dot Dot Dot, no.15, Oct-Nov, pp.90-112. Pg. 110 [19] Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008) Philosophical Chronicles (Trans. F. Manjali), New York: Fordham University Press. p.61-62
[20] Rogoff, Irit, (2006) ‘Academy as Potentiality’ in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (Ed. Nollert, A, Rogoff, I, De Baere, B & et al.) Frankfurt, Germany: Revolver. pp. 13-20, p. 19
[21] Rogoff, Irit, (2006) ‘Academy as Potentiality’ in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (Ed. Nollert, A, Rogoff, I, De Baere, B & et al.) Frankfurt, Germany: Revolver. pp. 13-20, p. 14
[22] Rogoff, Irit, (2006) ‘Academy as Potentiality’ in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (Ed. Nollert, A, Rogoff, I, De Baere, B & et al.) Frankfurt, Germany: Revolver. pp. 13-20, p. 17
[23] Massumi, Brian (2002) ‘Like a Thought’ in A Shock to Thought (Ed. B. Massumi), London & New York: Routledge. pp. xiii–xxxix, p. xxxi
[24] Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. B. Massumi), London & New York: Continuum. p. 343

2009-01-24T18:43:00.002+13:00

How did a city that commissioned buildings such as the Town Hall, Canterbury University Library and Administration Building, a city that has the Dorset Street flats, Port Authority Building, Christchurch College (College House) Chapel, and the Paul Pascoe Domestic terminal building allow heritage to be valued so poorly? The history of society can only be documented in a limited capacity, one of those being architecture; by destroying architecture (as seen recently in the Gaza Strip) you can erase the history of a people, movement, or culture. Currently that practice is occurring and we are watching.

Returning to the image above how is this design sensitive to the history of a once rich capital of design? What motivated the decisions for this seminal public building? And where is the sensitivity to the history of the location? The destruction of Pascoe's domestic terminal without any regard for its place in history highlights a serious lack of design credibility or investigation into the loaded vein of Christchurch modern architecture (which heavily differs from any other modern architecture in New Zealand).

We are not calling for revivalist architecture, but within the realms of architecture the opportunity to question currently seems to be lost, to quote Rem Koolhaas...

“I think that there is a huge difference at this point between those who try to be critical as architects and those – I definitely belong in this latter category- Who are critical of architecture, in terms of its limitations and capabilities” 1

To establish limitations and capabilities shouldn't’t we revisit that which came before and explore those histories before sensibility and ideology take command. We cannot reinvent the wheel, but look to the wheel that came before to create the limitations that can be pushed through discussion, debate, with rigor to establish a way forward.

We propose to be critical of architecture. We propose that a forum such as this offers the opportunity to explore the realms of limitation and capability within the local, and offers a voice of difference and perhaps a way for a direction.

1. AV Monographs. Sept Oct 2007. Critical Mass - Urban Philosophies