The Performance Shed
Life Engineering 02
Architectural Association
Diploma Unit 14
London, United Kingdom, 2001-2002
Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara
Lecturer: Neil Leach
Collaborators: Roberto Lombardi, Simon Kim, Mirco Becker, Sebastian Khourian, Frven Lim, Mark Hemel, Nate Kolbe
Consultants: Reuben Brambleby, Jessica Brew, Paul Earwalker, Alex Johnson, Stephan Reuter, Paul Scott
Students: Jin Bok We, Christian Hutter, Raymond Lau, Kevin Lim, Lea Katseli, Ifeanyi Oganwu, Jordi Pages i Ramon, Rodrigo Rada, Eva Scheffler, Chiang Tat Lee
Life Engineering understands the practice of architecture as a problem of material organization, aligned in principle with the most established modern agenda. But rather than rooting its materialism in the mechanistic paradigm, it endeavours to open it to a generative life, working on the intensification of the organizational condition of architecture to the point of curving it. More precisely, to the point of recognizing that its straightness is a particularly aestheticized case.
The research assumes that a material organization participates in many forms and scales of order that, while continuous at a performative level, have been segregated in separate domains of expertise and decision-making. This multiplicity is embedded in temporal processes far larger than that of the architect’s traditional competence. The Performance Shed proposes the construction of a machine operating as if before the project, a pre-architectural mode of material life.