UNIT PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Format Factory

'Format Factory' addresses the cultural crisis of western civilisation and challenges the possibility of a formal autonomy in architecture by referring to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas of Images (1924-1929) and exploring a notion of format developed from the artistic tension between 'form' and 'content'. It is subject to the theoretical and practical constraint in which 'format' is the only 'content' of the project, eventually leading to a mise en abyme of forms.

As a theoretical as well as practical exercise, the project develops its methodology by relating to artistic and knowledge theories and comes to a formal realisation in a site-less, self-referential and self-contained universe.
The architect of this project is constantly altering between ways of seeing and ways of arranging the physical and cultural world. On one hand, he/she is understanding the relations between disparate objects by taking them out of, deconstructing and reconstructing new contexts. On the other hand, he/she shapes his/her own identity through his/her relation to the objects by continuously reformatting them in a constant negotiation between opening up or framing them as content. All in all, he/she is creating a living reciprocity between the act of knowing and the object of knowledge, which approximates the message and the medium.

'Format Factory' encourages the misuse of techniques of linear narration and dualistic oppositions within a project in order to exceed the epistemological frameworks imposed by history in favour of our own, more intuitive, fictional truths.
New formats are crucial framing devices in the production of architecture, knowledge and identity!