THE ABSENT THING

Not in the place where it is expected to be

Questioning is an art that, particularly, architects and academicians should never lose.

The endless questioning habit of toddlers, which is scarcely witnessed in higher education, can deploy citizens, politicians, architects, and scholars in procedures of problem solving rather than solution making. Indeed, the practice of questioning is needed to expand the traditional boundaries of architectural education (particularly undergraduate) from being confined to tacit and explicit knowledge about more socio-cultural realms.

What I mean here is exploration and discovery of different perspectives that can produce different logic and fresh methods of cognition and verification. The act of advancing knowledge through research to produce clear, logical, and original thought, later can be applied to written work or a design but, as RIBA reported, is less intended by architects.

The course, ARCH511 Interdisciplinary Workshop, is a graduate course offered to master students and PhD candidates in the architecture program at EMU. Each semester is conducted based on a specific themes and is a tailored teaching and learning journey. In the fall semester of 2020-2021, we (instructors) decided to offer a new format that could scaffold the art of questioning in our students by reminding them about the social and environmental obligations of architects and highlighting architecture as a cultural medium.

The expectation of this particular semester was directed toward creation of an original point of view built from collation and organization of knowledge in an interdisciplinary way. Therefore, the semester’s strategy and activities were set up with several short-term assignments including reading, watching, and presenting with a primary writing assignment designed as a team project under the main theme of “the absent thing.”

The initiation of this theme was derived from three works by Italian author, Italo Calvino’s (1923-1985): his published lectures, his magical fantasy in Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and his novel Invisible Cities (1972) along with the way he turned theory into poetics in those works. Calvino, in 1988, while defining his six memos (values and qualities) for the coming millennium, emphasized the use of language. He said, “words connect the visible track to the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a fragile make-shift bridge cast across the void.” (Italo Calvino, “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, 2016 [1988], pp. 91, 94.)

We wished to start our semester with these publications of Calvino because they seemed an excellent analogy to our semester journey by exploring his nested networks of connection between people, events, and all the things of the world. The paper titled “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object”, written by Mieke Ball (2000), was another material used to get closer to this artists’ various works in which architecture is present in her art but never straightforward, and never alone. Mieke Ball wrote, “when two incompatible domains bounce back on each other (Example of where sculpture becomes architecture and architecture sculpture in Louise Bourgeois’ works) narrative becomes a tool, not a meaning; a mediator, not a solution; a participant, not an outsider then we find the artist as a cultural philosopher.”

Actually, what was supposed to be acquired, after interdisciplinary exploration of the works of other artists, were improved skills in approaching things with discretion, attention, caution, and with respect to what these things can tell us without words (as Calvino said). Therefore, we all undertook a precedent study from cited projects in the book titled, 1000 Ideas by 100 Architects, by Sergi Duran and Mariana Eguaras. Students’ works on published projects in the book were discussed in platform to communicate meanings and similarities under the main theme of the absent thing.

Philosophy ‘‘provides a fundamental perspective in terms of which pieces of the work of the social scientist can be put together in a coherent unity’’ (Natanson, 1973, p. 31). Therefore, a study in the key tenets of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and Derrida’s deconstruction and hermeneutics were also carried out.

Parallel to routine discussions and presentations around introduced or alluded to theories and philosophies, the primary term project for the semester was proffered under very wide research areas. In order to provide freedom to students to pursue their professional interest areas, they were encouraged to construct their topic by thinking across  the boundaries of Urban Design, Architectural Design, Interior Space Design, Landscape Design, and Industrial Design as well as other humanities and science-related fields such as economics, sociology, psychology, environmental sciences. The group term projects were reviewed several times during the semester and reviews took place in the online platform of Microsoft Teams.

In the end, what I would like to highlight is that I believed that “the absent thing,” as the theme for the semester, could become more than a word and idea. The suggestiveness of its emblems was a strong reason to encourage participation in a challenging endeavor. Students of this semester developed dense poetical, philosophical, and scientific words, which each fill a gap in research. …eventually they found their absent thing

Assoc.Prof. Dr. Badiossadat Hassanpour

Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture
Eastern Mediterranean University