Concepts of Transformation

The Aarhus School of Architecture has been focusing on concepts of transformation
as a special area of teaching and research for some time. Changes
in the built environment are important knowledge for the understanding of
contemporary architectural practices and include a professional concern:
how to make design contributions to a pre-existing context. This challenge
serves as a fundamental starting point for the School’s Research Lab 1,
Transformation, and its development of concepts, methods, and theories on
the relationship between architecture and resource awareness. The Research
Lab 1 has taken a broad research approach to transformation that includes
architecture, architectural heritage, landscape architecture, cultural environments,
urban design, and planning.
In 2017, visiting professor Andrés Mignucci from Puerto Rico was invited
to the Research Lab to reflect on concepts of transformation in a workshop
at the School. He presented a comprehensive overview of transformation
in architecture and added a list of concepts. The discussion that followed
shed a new light on alterations in the built environment, and resulted in a
thinking-and-writing process at the Research Lab 1 developing to find a
mutual understanding of transformation processes. The outcome was a book
called Concepts of Transformation presenting fourteen perspectives on transformation.
In this collection of ideas, changes throughout the life of a built
environment are seen as a consequence of natural processes. Alteration is a
companion to architecture. Accordingly, concepts of transformation must be
defined by their contemporary context, which in turn leads to time-bounded
interpretations. Transformation becomes a professional ethical obligation of
architecture and a new ethos of architectural theory.