Site, context and place
Are architects well placed to be the people thinking about this?
Project: Taichung Location: Taiwan Strait Architect: CHORA Date: 2008 Mini-scenarios. CHORA asks participants to go out into the field to make observations and identify examples of four processes happening on site: Erasure, Origination, Transformation and Migration. These processes form a narrative called a ‘mini-scenario’. These scenarios can be generated and used to describe the dynamic quality of any site.
Sometimes we think that we’re not, sometimes we feel powerless. We think we cannot influence the large decisions; we’re powerless against the decisions of a city planner, the politicians. But I believe we are not because architects are dreamers and at the same time we bring together utilitarian components and make them work. Look at [Andrea] Palladio: he looked at musical systems that created harmony in the universe and he tried to apply that harmony to the proportions of his buildings. Would it be correct to say that when you visit a site you record close-up, on-the-ground findings, but when you’re away from the site you are more focused on large-scale data, maps and statistical information? On the site sometimes you pick a very detailed thing that you couldn’t even imagine if you were away from the site. Over the years we developed a method, which was actually the start of our overall methodological approach that we have now. We start with a small exercise, which consists of a set of four processes that we try to observe. The four processes are like a filter and they are set in such a sequence that once the observations are made they form small narratives. We call them ‘mini-scenarios’. It is something we use to mediate the subjective approach to the site into a more structured formulation, so that the experiences can be compared with each other. That’s why it gets really exciting: if you go with a group of 20 or 200 people to a territory and each of them uses this device several times over, you get an almost instant weaving of narratives related to this territory.
The design project
Could you explain the four processes? They are Erasure, Origination, Transformation, Migration. I developed them while having a walk with Alain Chiaradia. He was teaching with me at the AA [Architectural Association]. It’s based on a metaphor to do with planting seeds in a garden. First you have the empty ground and you plant the seed, then the plant grows and reaches maturity, then the seeds float away in the wind. That’s the metaphor but at the same time the processes themselves are a basic taxonomy, set up in such a way you could describe any kind of existing dynamic environment through [them].