Call for contributions: #ConstructiveDisobedience

In 1418, Filippo Brunelleschi won the competition to build the Florentine dome of Santa Maria del Fiore with a design that proposed the largest ever masonry dome without the need for a material-intensive framework. When asked how exactly he intended to execute his idea of the double-shell construction, he replied in his dispositivo at the start of construction: “because in masonry, practice teaches how to proceed.” (“Perché nel murare la pratica insegna qello che s’ha a seguire.”)

Brunelleschi’s dome, like the Tour d’Eiffel by engineers Koechlin and Sauvestre or Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome, are examples of such experimentalism. Although they were not conceived as research projects, they are nevertheless epistemic objects: They embody knowledge that has been built. As prototypes, long-term experiments and in their physically-spatial presence, they become milestones of constructive progress. In view of urgent climate and resource challenges, it is now more than ever true that the further development of constructive possibilities requires daring experiments in building practice. 

However, anyone who formulates a proposal for reinventing, modifying, optimising or reducing a construction based on an architectural idea is aware of the big no to experimentation on the building site. Open-ended work is the premise of all research, but it also contradicts the interests of both clients and construction firms. Whereas science demands that results from ideas be published as provisional knowledge, tested and, in the event of falsification, rewritten on the basis of one another, fault-free construction appears as the only allegedly correct procedure, inscribed in DIN and BIM detail proposals for construction. But how can we seriously recalibrate and reformulate our construction standards in the face of the acute climate crisis?

In constructive experimentation, the public interest in building with an eye to the future overlaps, as it were, with a genuine architectural design practice which, in the intensification of a spatial idea, pursues the congruence or the conscious juxtaposition of constructive constitution and architectural expression. Here, the potential for synthesis and the often-volatile metamorphoses of architecture as the leading discipline in the development process of a solution become openly apparent. In order to illuminate the successful ways of expanding today’s normative frameworks to include design and construction processes, the timing and context of an experiment would seem significant: 

The problem of “resolving the conflict”
The process starts with a critical observation of problematic building standards, which under current market logic are becoming increasingly acute and unavoidable. 

The idea / “another mad idea”
A design concept provokes an idea for which the realisation has not yet been thought through and tested constructively, which means that the realisation is regarded as open-ended.

The individual case / “the value of speculation” 
During the design process, seismic points appear which push the fundamental idea to the limits of what can be built and which prove to be reference points for the architectural intention in the ongoing planning and construction processes right up to the building site.

#Constructive Disobedience invites architects, engineers, manufacturers and craftspeople to present a specific insight into their constructive experiments and to engage in exchange. The aim is to find instructions for action—dispositivi—on how we can enable constructive experimentation from the core of the profession, understand it methodically, establish it as design research and thus bring it into recognition academically andon the building site. What culture of risk can and must be established in the service of responsible architectural production and how can we make a living from it?

For the presentation at the conference on September 15–16, 2022, please apply with an abstract on one DIN A4 page with a maximum of 500 words plus illustrations (drawing / picture) and a short-biography as PDF (max. 5 MB) to contact@constructive-disobedience.com.

Deadline, abstracts: March 15 2022
Notification of selection: April 28, 2022
Full paper: September 1, 2022
Conference: September 15–16, 2022
Publication: March 2023