ABSTRACT
Market Meditations sought to explore a performative approach to post-occupancy – RIBA Plan of Work Stage 7 – as a form of critical architectural practice. This chapter presents a case study on Helen’s work in practice, which is interdisciplinary and aims to engage with and make visible alternative ways of constructing knowledge about place. It explores how an architectural research-led project that foregrounds performativity and architecture through active/social terms as a ‘site of group co-ordination in space over time’, might employ performance-based methodologies and practices to research and produce space. Her research relates to the way architecture produces certain ways of behaving, yet requires movement and interaction with the body to be understood. In this interrelationship, buildings and public space are perhaps better understood as ‘performative conditions’ – ‘acting on us and activated by us’. Market Meditations sits within a wider body of research that develops practice-based tools and actions that then feed back into architectural research.
