Wilding and weaving: a relational design practice

This doctoral research study is embedded in and developed through the creative practice Helen & Hards pursuit of making environmentally sound architecture in a professional market. The practice’s experience, through engaging in many projects, is that the current discourse on sustainable architecture tends to focus too much on energy efficiency, CO2 calculations, and new technologies. It often neglects the more intrinsic ecological potential of architecture, which I argue lies in its relational, experiential and poetic natures. This research explores and articulates this potential in the context of the design practice, Helen & Hard (H&H). Furthermore, it investigates the relationship between an individuals creative access to this embodied knowledge and the systemic frameworks which can help to bring it forth in the collective endeavours of creating architecture. The research includes a mapping of H&H as an evolving system as well as a study of the individual creative acts of drawing. The drawing work has given access to a spatial history connected to the harsh Norwegian coastal landscape, finding expression in a dynamic between wilding and weaving lines in the drawing – a poetic description of creative forces which are both singular and inclusive. But it has also revealed what frameworks and conditions made this tacit knowledge grow and develop and how it could be made explicit through using drawing as a research method. It is in the tension between these two very different modes of practicing architecture – the affective and systemic – and, as I experience it, their co-dependent relationship when creating architecture that I hope the research finds and unfolds a specific contribution. These two perspectives are used to discuss and reflect on old projects as well as case studies of developing, ongoing projects to tease out and explicate the embedded knowledge of the practice. The reational design practice of H&H can be understood within a triad of capacities: a sensitivity and respect for the singular, a nurturing of inclusive and emergent design development and a systemic agency. With these capacities and interests, making architecture for H&H means at the same time producing and being supported by designs which can allow for emergent development and behaviour and where multiple feedback is welcomed and valued. The research adds articulation and knowledge to spatial, aesthetic capacities, which supports these relational developments in the practice of H&H.