FORMAT FACTORY
Extended Project Description
ACADEMIC CONTEXT
''Format Factory'' was realized by myself and my tutor Natasha Sandmeier in Diploma Unit 9 at the Architectural Association in 2014-15. The project is by no means a finished piece of work but one possible response to the questions raised in the debates on architecture as a cultural practice.
Architecture exhibits an ambiguous relationship between its traditional model and the circumstances under which the practice reinvents itself. The architect is constantly measuring his intuitions against the object of study in order to acurately mediate his work to a wider audience often desperate for meaning.
At the AA, the student's project is not designed to present solutions to problems but, as our tutor wrote in the unit brief, ''to ask the questions to cultivate the cultural frisson necessary for ideological evolution alongside technological advancements within the field of architecture''. This freedom of design pushes the student to take responsibility of their own education, harness their artistic energies and take decisions in the creative service industries later on.
ACADEMIC PRECEDENTS
I wanted to embrace this opportunity in order to understand and articulate which material realities and philosophical questions really fueled my interest in architecture, art and media.
I wanted to reveal the limitations which each form of media would pose to our methods of producing architecture, both physically and intellectually. I wanted to understand the relation between form and content through a constant reformatting of the work. The portfolio, the book and the website were indispensable products of the project.
My predecessors in Diploma 9 have defined their portfolios through manifestos, models, artifacts, books and plates. The latter forced them to synthesize the relationships between things in a single piece of work such as a tableau or video. Hence Aby Warburg has become the new muse and the Mnemosyne Atlas the overarching precedent of the unit, not least due to the more recent comparisons to 'online archives'.
THE MNEMOSYNE ATLAS
The Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929), the last project of the German ''cultural scientist'' Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929), is an unfinished visual, metaphoric and theoretical encyclopaedia. The constellation of symbolic images on black canvas is an attempt to map the pathways that give art history and cosmography their pathos-laden meanings. It is thought to animate the viewer's memory, imagination, and understanding of what he called ''the afterlife of antiquity.'' (Please find the case study of the Warburg Libraries and Mnemosyne Atlas here.)
As the format wasn't suitable to communicate its content beyond his death, the project couldn't be completed by Warburg's successors and is now kept in the Warburg Institute in London.
The Mnemosyne Atlas is a paradigm for man's ambition to understand certain phenomena and his struggle to orient himself in the amount of things of the world.
Format Factory is at once a reenactment and critical reaction to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas which questions the relationship between content and form through engaging in the production of material arrangements and their presentation. It is therefore relating to personal secret obsessions with collecting, bookmarking or classifying the stuff which seems to matter or which we attach meaning to.
CONTENT VERSUS FORMAT
In a world before language, there may have been no difference between subjective and objective meanings.
In Ancient Greece, epic poetry artificially clarified the gaps between the material and immaterial worlds and was recited in the public sphere of the Agora (Ancient Greek: public open space used for assemblies and markets) by art of speech such as in Homer's Illiad. Regardless of which came first, language or thought, the object stood as the material evidence for man's creative existence and technical dependence in the process of subjectivation. Later on philosophers andf cultural theorists defined the world as being highly conditioned by language and its repository in physical formats and they defined technology as an extension of man.
Enclosed by images and signs which make us experience everything immediately all the time, and similar to the Mnemosyne Atlas, meaning is now assumed everywhere.
Incapable of dealing with huge quantities of information and accelerated communication, content ceases to be absorbed. The 'man without qualities' tends between indifference or illusion.
Having learned from the cautionary tales of the utopian projects of the 60s and 70s, today's architect needs to claim architecture as a cultural and material practice.
Format Factory challenges traditional notions of meaning through a conceptual constraint: The project was conceived as an conceptual mise-en-abyme, ultimately treating format as the only content!
Within this constraint, I was stripping concepts back to their basic understanding and used just enough references to drive the project forward.
The project script is marked in ''green'' throughout the following pages.
THE BOOK
While my initial opinions were clarified to myself during weekly tutorials and juries, the accumulation of rather fleeting thoughts also needed to be fixed.
I chose the format of the book, often taken for granted as a container of memory, to disseminate the ideas formulated into written word to a broader audience.
Although the finished version of the book, also called the 'White Book', was set out from the beginning of the project, its contents still needed to be conceived. The book was yet to be used as an auxiliary tool to stimulate, document and edit the ongoing development of the project. Due to the conceptual constraint explained in the paragraph above, the different steps of the project involved seemingly naive questioning such as ''what is format, site, media?'' which force to rethink the methodologies used to establish certainty about things and phenomena in the past.
Therefore the table of contents included here couldn't build up on a given taxonomy (Greek: Taxis ''arrangement or order'' nomos ''law or rule'') but was subject to a state of work-in-progress.
The project chapters were titled after these principal questions forming the thesis of the project. The process of reconnecting and remembering fragmented lines of thought produced built and unbuilt spatialities. Like a city which produces an archive of itself through its own administration, Format Factory produced its own formats through its own organization and control. The difficulties consisted in the negotiation between quick intuitive responses and a distancing from the object in order to treat format as argumentation rather than representation. Partly formatting the other formats which it was tested against, such as the models, blog posts or website, each format mediates its own success and failure.
THE WEBSITE
Throughout the project I couldn't let go of the idea of making a drawing which would serve as an index of the relationships between objects and thoughts, as though this would hold the key to my little world. The discussion revolving around the construction of artifacts as well as their real or imagined contexts was open and accepted. At the end, it became clear that the fictional construct of this non-linear project remained beyond representation.
Instead of an indexical drawing, the format of the website, referring to the Internet as a source of information leading to knowledge, lend itself to imitate the project methodology, rejecting linear narration and dualistic oppositions. Deconstructing traditional categories of knowledge may be a means to finding new intersecting points of human communication and understanding.
Finally I fed the content of the project into the structure of a website as objet trouve to present the final version of the project to my audience and the tutors at the end of the year jury.
The format of the website allowed me to jump from project chapter to project chapter (Format - Site - Context - Factory - Method - Technique - Media - Culture - Process - etc.) by using the main navigation, all whilst maintaining the ability to read through the project in non-linear ways (unlike a conventional power point presentation) by clicking the different links which are embedded on the pages . I chose to include an image here and provide a link to the final presentation format here as a preview to the following content here.
Although Format Factory as a project finished at the end of the academic year, its educational values will unfold as long as time allows.
But first, please enjoy this unusual project narrative resulting from the project's conceptual straightjacket with great humour.
(click here for the final presentation website: http://dip9.aaschool.ac.uk/FormatFactory/)