Demonstration: ‘The Dramaturgy of Lime’

The project addresses the issue that architecture has become increasingly image-based, where the ideal state of a building is often conceived as immediately after being built and it appears as on the drawing. Considerable resources are used to counteract wear and tear, working against external forces and processes (entropy). Opposing the idea of maintaining the building as this ideal and static entity, the PhD project investigates weakness and instability as architectural potentials. This approach involves a dynamic relationship and exchange between materials, forces and processes.

Lime (calcium compounds) infiltrates our everyday life. It assumes different forms and conditions, and moreover, serves as an intriguing subject of investigation in relation to forces, instability and change. The exhibited work aims to create a set-up where the instability of lime becomes exposed, investigating the aesthetical and performative potentials – the dramaturgy - of lime.

The work makes visible the poetics and the multitude dimensions of an ordinary material such as lime and encourages attentiveness to the minor changes around us. Examples of the weak sacrificial parge coat layer, lime mortar, and artworks of Richard Serra and Joseph Beuys demonstrates how working actively with relations between forces and degrees of instability can act as aesthetical and performative drivers of change, as well as being beneficial from a practical perspective. This suggests an alternative architectural approach which challenges the idea of architecture as a static image and instead embraces change as a visible sign of time passing - and where intentional, embedded weakness enables ways of acting in the uncertain.