Starter

TOWARDS THE COMPLEX-OBJECT
Research

Martin Hättasch
exhibited at Rice University, Houston, TX
2011

supported by the 2010/11 Wortham Fellowship at Rice University

Team: Amanda Crawley, Rachel Dewane, Jessica Tankard

This research was undertaken as part of the 2010/11 Wortham Fellowship at Rice University in Houston, TX and presented in the 2011 Wortham Fellows’ Exhibition in the form of a manifesto.

“For decades architects have busied themselves with understanding, mapping, and digitally replicating the ever increasing complexities of every aspect of our built and unbuilt environment. The result has been an extraordinarily well informed paralysis. If architecture is to be more than a mere replication of temporal relationships, it needs to regain its agency through hard form. In times of political uncertainties and economic flux only hard architectural form can provide a neutral backdrop and define spaces for a renewed collective experience in the vast expanses of anonymous urban fabric. This is possible precisely because form is disconnected from the non-formal systems that make up our economic, ecological and political environment.”