Inner-Outer and the Tickling Object
Type: Master Class / Workshop
When: 9th semester, spring 2010
About: Inner-Outer & the Tickling Object + Mosque, Århus
This project was a two weeks intens Master Class / Workshop together with the Australian architects Gerard Reinmuth and Richard Blythe from the office Terroir.
The Master Class was a combination of theoretical and practical work in teams, divided into five phases. The workshop started out with lectures, textanalysing and discussions and ended up with a (more or less) concrete proposal for a mosque in the center of Århus, right next to an old church.
Inner-Outer: A synopsis
“The idea of culture has become uncertain – in the sense that in our globally interconnected reality, the very idea of culture as a stable, shared condition is fundamentally questionable. Culture can now be individually constructed according to constellations of Facebook friends or Twitter followers. We contest that this absence of traditional communal systems requires architecture to engage the subject by means of personal experience, rather than symbolically.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has worked with TERROIR on these issues. He has coined the idea of tickling object. This “tickling” is generated by what Zizek calls a “controlled indeterminacy” between the inner spatial organization and outer surface. Indeterminacy is critical for it allows for continual acts of rediscovery within repeated experience. We will explore three key modes of engagement – phenomenological, political and psychoanalytical – via which such rediscovery might be possible.
Key to this approach is the idea that what is important about architectural projects is their specificity. That is, we are interested in what is absolutely particular about a situation and in ways that architecture can work to engage people with that particularity. We are searching for moments when an architectural experience can allow people to see their world in new and surprising ways – new in the sense that something of the particularity of a project, of its conditions, of its histories or futures, becomes palpable through experience. This is what you might call a kind of wonder or poetics of architecture.
TERROIR work in search of this poetics, searching for the moments of surprise and intrigue which can exist between the inner and the outer. The result is an architecture which tickles the inhabitant into seeing their world anew. This is what we will strive for in Aarhus as students will use these techniques to address a significant site and issue within their city.”
