Hephaistos: Power and Agency

The following text sets out the ambitions of the 1:1 Semester project Hephaistos and its reflection on Power and Agency, conducted at The Institute of Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism at the Royal Danish Academy School of Architecture. From the project's conception we embraced a phenomenological approach through an engaged working process. Our focus was on architecture’s experiential potential respective of physical or mental ability. We achieved our objectives, by embracing the phenomenological capacity of architecture. Creating four pavilions focusing on sensory experience; sound, sight, smell, and haptics.

The teaching module has been democratic and collective, without hierarchy we have questioned conventional power structures within academia. The project was made possible by and in partnership with H22 City Expo, Bevica Foundation, IKEA, Spacon & X, Dinesen and SUHM. Without hierarchy, the student cohort and teaching staff worked together. This process was dependent on a robust pedagogical methodology or an ‘active problem-based learning methodology'1. Focus was placed on the abilities of the whole group and its collective ability to produce meaningful research. Our working structure, a concise day planning method, was infrastructural in its intent. Detailed to the day over the 12-week program, precise expectations regarding output, format and content type allowed students and teaching body confidence to produce and appraise material effectively.

The intention of this correspondence was to utilise the skill and ability of the many, foregrounding material with critical content and refining incrementally. The emphasis on the collective over the individual sought to test the single authorship model typical of modern architecture. This methodological approach could be seen as discursive, infrastructural, and democratic in its intent. The emphasis on the collective format necessitated speed and precision of communication between groups and program leaders. Student responsibilities changed over the course of the program from offering initial design perspectives to more focussed design input on building component parts. Reviews were frequent, bi-weekly, students were encouraged to forego the typical participatory method offering feedback first to the process.

The input of our collaborators, four young people representing SUHM, with cognitive and physical
disabilities, further focussed dialogue. Output was focussed on the physical entity; maquette, model and 1.1 construct were the formats chosen. Democratic and accessible to all these constructs shifted emphasis from the digital format allowing collaborators access. Material could be touched, the full sensory potential exercised, this deliberate diversification, a shift from an optical emphasis asked questions of typical architectural media utilised at first year level and the importance of client and collaborator inclusion during project conception. Our client IKEA, represented by a curatorial team at Spacon & X, provided a counterpoint to SUHM’s input. Curatorial insight and appraisal brought realism and objectivity to an internalised process focussed on studio discussion and workshop production. Client, workshop technician, user group collaborator and academic input completed an alternate information input model informed by industry rigour.