Space and Looking

The research of the past years resulted in two publications, Look Space! A Story of Analogous Spaces (2017) and The Matrix Project (2018).

Today’s research is based on the further development of analogous spaces and the concretization of their characteristics and qualities. This is done through a series of doctoral projects within the research group and the supervision of master thesis projects. Each of these trajectories makes use of drawing and drawing as a conscious act that leads to making analogous spaces more explicit.

With respect for the concrete material investigated, all of them share an explicit common fascination for the creation and better understanding of new spatialities and for questioning ways of looking. These ways of anchoring intangible and mental paradigms in our reality illustrates how analogous spaces are becoming productions that interact with the investigator and an audience. They share their knowledge production that is quite often tacit, implicit and even embodied. Their way of looking is extremely conscious and focused and molded by their experience of being an architect or a visual artist. There I situate my next challenge. How can we increase the better understanding of the knowledge production embedded in a spatial output?

For the past two years, an additional research project has been set up, starting from the Academic Design Office that I lead together with Dimitri Vangrunderbeek: The Double Look, Abstraction. This collaboration between a visual artist, sculptor and architect sets abstraction versus architecture as the central theme. Where abstraction is a common good within the visual arts, this is much less the case within the discipline of architecture. From the applied experiment the different possibilities and meanings are explored.

It all starts from the act of a close re-looking to (own) productions and contexts. This act introduces a multi-focality that generates new insights on the qualities of the subject. It becomes a process of becoming conscious of the meaning of looking. We are convinced that this notion is an elementary quality an artist and architect should embody.

by Thierry Lagrange