Offramp

ar·ti·fact

/ˈärdəfakt/

This issue aims to explore artifacts from a disciplinary approach, both as an objective and subjective matter, an artifact that could be understood not only as a Fact but also as the state of the Art. Critical questions are raised here regarding the position of matters of fact in architectural history, philosophy, and design. In our discipline, we constantly “build” intellectual and concrete artifacts, which not only brings the physical or digital object into existence but also the discourses built around it.

If facts imply certainty and probabilistic assurance while design signifies an act of subjectivity and speculation, does that make architecture more artifactual than factual? If the discipline rests on the aggregation of individual conceptualizations and beliefs, doesn’t that make it less empirical and more aesthetic? Is the intellectual collective consensus sufficient to constitute facts in the architectural discourse?

As we fling around the term “object” within architectural discourse, questioning its relationship to other things, perhaps it’s time to critically step back. Take a step back and look at all the stuff we have accumulated.

Stuff—the name we use to describe the indescribable, unspecific, imprecise—encompasses our overwhelming inability to consider things individually. However, stuff is not things. Stuff flattens things, it generalizes objects into a flat ontology and isn’t ashamed to admit it. Stuff is also versatile, and dimensional, in that it can collect miscellaneous entities across vast stretches of the universe in the simple use of any random adjective: Fun Stuff. Pink Stuff. That Stuff.

Stuff is unmeasurable, invisible. It can be matter, energy, space, collections, aggregates. Stuff can be old, new, borrowed, or blue. Stuff is inclusive and diverse. Stuff is microscopic and stuff is bigger than the universe. Stuff has smoky boundaries, stuff is shapeless. Stuff is everything and nothing.

‘The crowd’ can be understood as both object and experience: viewed from a distance, from above, as data, pressing in from all sides, pushing towards the exit, or up against the barricade. How to figure the crowd, and to what end, depends on the contingency of where one stands. Variously identified as the population, the masses, or the multitude, the crowd remains an urgent category of contemporary aesthetics and politics, yet is often undervalued in architectural discourse today.

If social thought at the turn of the twentieth century understood the crowd as a figure to be feared and suppressed, we now speak of both ‘crowd intelligence’ and ‘smart cities’ as a new data-driven optimism towards the crowd and its algorithmic management. Politically transformative and spatially ambiguous but increasingly measurable, the crowd is the client, the brief, and the site: the universal basic datum of mass culture and contemporary urbanism.

As our lifestyles become more immersive, we are increasingly less aware of our congenital modes of experience. The ubiquity of digital technology has rearranged and restructured these modes, simultaneously creating illusive, yet palpable relationships to one another and our mechanisms of interaction. Our unprecedented access to the Internet, enables us to consume news, images, and information (both legitimate and illegitimate) rapidly. As a result, we interact with media superficially, obligated to instantly accept or reject the outward appearance of things in the form of ‘likes’ and emojis. This commodification of form and image has profound implications for the discipline; in the way we produce, discuss, and represent architecture. Offramp 13: Guise includes essays and projects that reflect on the oscillation between observing what is immediately perceivable and contemplating the indexicality of its construction.

The essays and texts included in this issue examine the relationship architectural discourse has with other disciplines and the effects on and of architecture. By shedding light on these relationships, Offramp 12 establishes new frameworks through which to view projects seeking such aesthetic variation.

Would it be blasphemous to propose that contemporary discourse is over-saturated with discussions of architectural objects? Recent debates on the desirable qualities of objecthood--legibility, abstraction, and so on--appear to have reached an impasse. 

Offramp 10 seeks essays and projects questioning architecture’s alternatives for cultural value. What possibilities for form and program, what challenges for material and immaterial qualities reveal features re-thinking architecture’s purpose beyond use?

Granting that architectural representations are in themselves a form of truth, what do they actually represent? What is the nature of their plural truths? To what degrees do falsehood, deceit, fiction, and lies play in this analysis? These are some of the questions Offramp 09 sets out to ask.