P A R A D I G M ◊ W E E K L Y

Paradigm Weekly focusses on the impact of contemporary visual culture on architectural practice. What is the influence of design media and representation? The studio is set up as a hybrid of arch school seminar, design collective and self-publishing platform. Students will produce a series of fast and speculative design projects, generating the design of the collective itself. Collectively we will organise a SPEED TRIP: a field trip transporting our research to existing places and situations.




S U R F A C E

Question is: how do we connect the so-called thorough practice of incremental conceptual work with the seemingly ominous but very pervasive culture of the (scroll)surface? What's a S N O W F L A K E got to do? What millennial ways of enquiry and action can be invented, recognised or embraced to work in our time?



The studio undertakes a deep experiment with strategies of surrender and subversion, in order to devise alternative modes of practice for architects to exist at the surface that is today’s context. We will learn to operate behind a mask, not to hide, but affording ourselves the flexibility of a persona [Kanye Kabanon], to explicitly provoke and explore, in order to learn. Going public is part of the experiment, for architecture and its culture exist only in their mediations. The studio is thus a performance, acting is learning, playing is questioning. We must immerse, surrender, undo and camouflage. From there we can subvert.



The studio welcomes architecture and art students to participate in its 4th consecutive staging.
Pieterjan Ginckels with Corneel Cannaerts / Paradigm Weekly is a SPEEDISM spin-off organised and hosted by the KU Leuven University Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels and Ghent.


Paradigm Weekly is organised as a spinoff studio of RS:

Our culture glides on the surface of things: light, fast, unnatural, superficial, conflictual. Our lives are hyperreal; they are themed, spectacular, illusionary. Concepts turn into alibis; idees-fixes mirror trends. Life without objections. We move in networks where relations between nodes have seemingly become unconditional, condition-less. This is a one-dimensional network, a cloud, in which all centers collide in a nucleus of individuality, the capsule’s capsule, and inside everyone continuously pimps, remixes, recollects and represents their own identity. In this accelerated world of prefiguration and project realization, the relation between the render, as a visual translation of the imagined into the real, and the physical world blurs. We describe this contemporary state as one of radical saturation.

Social media reshape processes and discourse in architecture, as well as the general environment in which architects live and work. Architects are surface makers. Images are our product, our mental universe, our theoretical landscape. The rendered image is architecture’s bottom line product and the blogosphere harbors its shipwrecks. The rendering’s sad, anticlimactic twin is its unrealizable promise. To deal with this, Radical Saturation can strategically be coined both as a condition of surface culture and as a method for surface-making. In order to know radical saturation, you have got to become Radical Saturation. Fight fire with fire?

RS proposes to develop critical, theoretical and practical paths of enquiry, based on embrace and surrender.
Embracing the cultural status quo and its markers and signifiers as a dominant force. Surrendering to the obsessions, fears, hopes and secrets that come with living and working in a duckfaced caffeinated culture. Embracing the fact that most of our built environment is not conceived—or hindered—by people from our proper field. Surrendering to the vectors of fashion: troika ecology, hypercapitalism, fear of missing out.



On our menu:

#MISANTHROPOCENE

#TANTRICURBANISM

#RADICALSATURATION