An Update from the Post Typical
In the PLAT 8.0 piece Post Typical, Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest of Ultramoderne proposed a renewed interest in the generic above the overly formal, as a way of resisting co-option and focusing on architecture’s social and material effects. In 10.5, they advocate for deep materialist explorations as a way to rethink our typical practices and foreground architecture’s social and ethical obligations.
When we wrote about the post-typical, what we meant was that architecture needs to get out of the way. Form-making needs to take a step back in order for architecture’s broader social and material effects to take center stage. But alongside this explicit aim resides a host of implicit assumptions that deserve to be laid bare. Put simply, the stuff that constitutes ‘almost nothing’ matters as much as the void that it circumscribes. By reconsidering form from the point of view of what it makes possible, we now have the attention span to focus on the stubborn material fact of architecture: the things that make up our walls, floors, roofs, and so on. This renewed link between the productive capacity of architecture and its material production opens up further considerations of labor, resources, environment, and carbon, in the context of more disciplinary issues like organization and atmosphere.
So how do we wrap our heads around all of this while maintaining our ethical obligation to the built? We dig in. Organizational concepts are paired with deep materialist explorations – contemporary architecture has the chance, at this moment, to exceed its purist tendencies; to expose and intensify its inherently heterogeneous basis. Reading the material and the social together in the space of architecture can allow us to discover ways of building that defy our typical practices. When we no longer adhere to received systems, we open up a conversation that is broader and that questions our initial assumptions of how we, as a society, put materials together today. What we gain is a re-appraisal of older and more global forms of making architecture, as well as a fresh way out of the impasse and predictability of the wall.
Images:
Wall Prototype 01
Column Prototype 01
Column Prototype 02
Prototype building elements. From the project Heterogenous Constructions, by Ultramoderne + Brett Schneider.
