“… the work refers back upon itself … it investigates itself … betters itself … looking at the last project I can see the beginning ...” Tom Kovac

The Contextual Surface

It is the view of TERROIR that in this interconnected global circumstance, architecture cannot rely on a fixed and singular cultural condition but needs to engage with complex interconnected and overlapping systems. An effective role architecture can play in this context is to ask questions of those relationships and to make propositions about those relations specific to the multiple contexts gathered in any one project. 

These questions are asked via a rigorous research process which commences every new project.  Specific research generates a body of knowledge which in turn becomes the theoeretical engine for every project. 

The difficulty of architectural practice is embedded in the need to make precise decisions – from how to distribute elements of a program to the joining of two materials at a corner – and to somehow make sense of these actions within the context of the project’s internal logic. 

 

To avoid this difficulty, architects often choose only to answer a simplified version of the questions a problem might pose.  This allows for clear, rational decisions to be made but in the context of gross simplification of a project’s complexities – resulting in a banal single image “concept” such as a wave, piece of coral, or cloud.  Contemporary architecture culture also thrives on the dissemination of projects with an easy-to-read simplicity in their conception and image – a simplicity founded on the avoidance of difficult negotiations.

 

Underpinning this situation is the idea of transcendence - that a form or force, often bought to the project by the architect, has an inherent usefulness or even moral rightness regardless of that project’s conditions.  This studio will counter this idea of transcendence with that of imminence – that is the idea that the process of a project’s production is contained within the project itself.  We will suggest how a project might be approached so that it develops an internal consistency and thus a system for decision-making which evolves continually in response to the circumstances in play.  In short, we are going to explore the idea of designing as an ethical endeavour. 

 

In TERROIR we have developed the idea of a contextual surface in order to generate this internal consistency for each project.  The contextual surface is constructed anew for each project and provides a mechanism for making the various prioritizations and negotiations particular to that project - where the project itself is understood as a constellation of coincident interests (developer, end user, public).  Each project develops a contextual surface unique to it, such that attempts to discern enduring ethical foundations across projects are thwarted by the very fact that each project challenges our own positions and to some extent re-forges how we see the world.

Some questions which interest us

Central to this interest in ideas is an obsession with the 'work' that the building will do.  What will be its value?  What will it change about its context?  Can this change be positive? 

Underlying this set of questions is another set:

How can architecture be relevant beyond a sort of personal statement?

How can projects be culturally relevant when culture as it has been understood historically has been so fundamentally challenged?

How can you determine which aspects of a project's context are relevant in determining the basis for a project?

While we contemplate buildings in terms of their creation, how might they operate post-creation - in other words how will people engage with our buildings, how they use them?

Underpinning all this is an incredible optimism - we still believe we can improve the world via what we do.

OUR DESIGN PROCESS IN GREATER DETAIL

Below is an extended exploration into some aspects of our design process.

Context

Fundamental to our approach is our physical structure and organisation - Scott is based in the “home” office in Hobart while Gerard is based in our Sydney office.  Richard floats in cyberspace between the two. 

The importance of this is that from the outset, TERROIR was understood as a collaborative space involving three people in remote locations.  Working in the contemporary environment from this perspective – with complex client bodies, multiple stakeholders, multi-locational clients and teams – is therefore the only state of existence that we know. 

Clients are aware of the significance of a design process based in multiple-authorship.  For, a structure which is already open and robust enough to accept input from diverse sources finds the presence of a client at the design table as the norm, not an exception.  This deep involvement with clients in the design process is the first step toward the specificity of our work.  It is also the first step towards its realisation given that our structure creates the very capacity often needed by clients to assist them in seeing a project through.  Our design process is not hidden from clients – rather they are engaged in it fully.

 

Landscape and Context

“When you are unfamiliar with a place you can get greater understanding, more imagination … Self-alienation to strip back meaning to look at patterns in a clear way.”

Zeynep Menem, Comments at GRC4, June 2006

Jean Nouvel has talked of the necessary specificity of each project – a concept to which we fully subscribe but which is rendered in our own particular way.  Meanwhile the Dutch obsession with program manipulation as a starting point for projects is surely now understood as a mannered and self-reflective approach which lacks the generosity to context and circumstance that might be considered more important than the individual project.   Buildings last for a long time but the morphology of the places in which they exist lasts for even longer.

The dramatic Tasmanian landscapes in which we spent our youth - and the superposition of these landscapes and the cities and towns of the island - instilled a respect for the role of place in any architectural act.  The idea of TERROIR emerged from this awareness of the importance of the specificity of place and the inevitable human intervention which transforms and remakes a place.

We increasingly use technology to provide an alien-like understanding of a context – images which are curated to strip any emotional or preconceived attachment to a place from the information.  This comes from a long standing need to increase the methods via which we can strip a site of detail to assist in clarifying a project context through a process of calculated defamiliarisation.

Operating in multiple locations enables one of us to hold and encourage a detached “alien” view and thus guards this conceptual driver to the design when the specific program requirements and detailed issues require attention.  Thus, the “distance” with which we have structured in our office is combined with a range of technologies and techniques to assist in maintaining this defamiliarised and clarified state.

 

Program

Trained in the late 80s and early 90s enabled a ringside seat in the return of program as a critical force in architectural production.  However, this was a program not limited to a list of functional requirements but as a statement of critical intent.  The operative potential of a diagram was understood favourably when compared ro the limitations of the conceptual sketch. 

For TERROIR, the manipulation of program within critical and ethical frameworks relocates the client brief in a productive space.  Many projects manipulate program to create spaces essential to meet client aims - often spaces not mentioned in the brief.

 

Conceptual Operations

“You seem to agree on a metaphor or metaphors that hold the discussion, deferring the coming to form.”

Sand Helsel, GRC 5, June 2006

The toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction;  it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative.  The toy opens an interior world, lending itself to fantasy and privacy in a way that the abstract space, the playground, of social play does not.  To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts, none of which is determinative ...”

On Longing.  Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Susan Stewart. Duke University Press (Durham and London 1993).

The galvanising of landscape, context and programmatic explorations is achieved via the deployment of conceptual operations as both a generative and organisational tool. 

TERROIR's interest in landscape is evidenced in conceptual operations which are often derived from natural occurrences and which then fuel stories about a project - stories which contain within them the design intelligence with which a project is explored and resolved.  This emphasis on easily understood concepts and storytelling are fundamental to the participation of team members and clients in the design process.     

This tendency to play with ideas takes real form in the way ideas are played with, often via conversations around models, used as a group of children would use toys.  The emergence of digital tools as a means for further exploring conceptual operations (particularly focused on the ability of an animation to include time) has not replaced these discussions around the toys/models produced by the process.

 

Curation and Control

Dealing with an expanding office - which carries with it new project types, sites and clients – has enabled reflection on our role as curators and directors of the practice.  We now understand each project as a film of sorts, and thus the structure and mode of operation of the team parallels the production of cinema – with Directors who harbour the vision and a team selected for their ability to flesh out and deliver this vision each with their own speciality and focus.  This use of the film industry as a framework has enabled us to transition from our early understanding of TERROIR authorship as having resulted from 3 pairs of hands to now include 25.

A generous office climate ensures that the utmost authority is vested with project architects, enabling an open design collaboration spirit extended to include modes of representation that often reflected the inherent skills of individuals on particular projects.  The client is also included and understood as part of the design team, making their contribution as a co-author of sorts.

The complexity of the resulting design environment leads to our understanding of the need to “take control” at key moments – not as a domineering management approach but to assist the project in clarifying and moving forward.  This tight management of the process is a form of insurance which guarantees the consistent quality output people have come to expect from the practice.  This is also the client’s guarantee that there is not 1^st string and 2st string TERROIR. 

 

Emotional Intelligence

“... this idea of the story and the idea that three people in a way seem to need a story and tell stories to each other to be able to focus the work.   Of course key elements in a story emerge and the fact that this story telling has very Australian humour at its core which is part of it as well”

Gerard, Terroir Book Symposium

We have described here a design process not as a production line process or as the activities within a ‘design studio’ – a term currently overused by corporate practice which is the last place one would expect to find true understanding of what it means. 

Rather, TERROIR projects evolve from a very clear and focused view of the world and a process we have developed to ensure that view permeates the work that we do.  We have not so much a design process but work within a design climate - and it is this climate which provides the consistancy seen in projects with diverse programs, conditions and budgets.