ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a new approach to the description of architectural form to highlight the fundamental agents and properties distinguishing it from other expressive media. Specifically, architectural space is treated as a field where the repetitive or contingent patterns of everyday use lead to the creation of special relationships between the occupants. The new approach to description is investigated via three parallel analyses. The first addresses Mallarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice never will abolish Chance (1897); the second discusses the conversion of an apartment in Athens, Greece, designed and implemented by our team A Whale’s architects in 2006; the third deals with a diagram drawn by George Brecht in his Notebook III in 1959 describing subjects and relations developed in the course of producing a musical work. 1
This new description of architectural form presupposes a fresh reconsideration of architecture as a medium and leads to a new stance towards architectural composition. In this process, the analysis of the poem generates an appreciation of the compositional properties that are associated with ‘anti-form’ while Brecht’s diagram instigates a potentially radical revision of how we represent architecture. The architectural project offers an example of materialising anti-form by constructing visually interrelated multifunctional spaces, open to alternative patterns of use and syntactic interpretations. Going about their everyday lives, the occupants of these spaces acquire specific competence in handling emergent patterns of co-awareness which fosters a richer and more alert relationship to their environment.
