ABSTRACT
The notion of productions begins to circumscribe what could be seen as simultaneously fundamental and exploratory forms of contemporary cultural creation. Describing the trajectory of the development of production-oriented practices, from planning to form to space to effect, is the fundamental question that helps to define productions and to situate the work of production-oriented practices (POP) with regard to larger trends in spatial design. The innovative and challenging projects generated by POPs emerge out of contemporary cultural conditions, but also are results of a continuum of radical conceptual and theoretical projects produced in the 1960s dealing with form, atmosphere, and technology. Tracing a trajectory from the production of effects through engagements with material, surface, finish, and form toward a production of form through the manipulation of effects engages a type of expanded performance. Through an understanding of productions, however, the vacuum between these poles may be engaged as a space where speculative, critical practices may claim territory.
