KKArchitects

Since the beginning of the second phase of the workshop students were encouraged to explore through maps, stories and any kind of data they could find, the five areas selected by the Middlesex research team. We begun to respond to the material sent to us by analyzing it in response to the ten keywords mentioned on the project’s brief.

From the beginning we discussed that the outcome of the workshop should be an architectural proposal that would incorporate the notions that the keywords represent. The aim of the workshop was to observe and try to locate any architectural expressions that can be found in any given data. The next step would consist of an attempt to translate these expressions to forms that could possibly acquire a public use.

The outcome is presented in three parallel ways.

- The sketchbooks which address to the more bookish viewers and incorporate the process and the unique path each of the students has taken.

- The pictorial essays which are the most eloquent part of the presentation and demonstrate the course that its project took beginning from the research sent to us, followed by some of the architectural references that were core to the development of the project and concluding with one or two collages of the final architectural proposal.

- And finally the paper models that are placed on the map. The models are an abstract interpretation of each one of the projects and not a three dimensional expression of it. They are meant to be read as a whole and provide the viewer with a more enigmatic version of the proposal which attempts to illustrate more the concept behind each project and less the architectural form it proposes.

The models play with the idea of folding and manipulating a single material to form shapes, diagrams and ideas. They are all inspired by origami, kirigami, folding techniques and pop up books and attempt to play with a language that is between graphics and architecture. One could say that they form some kind of paper gestures, unfinished ideas open to exploration. There are also two more complementary projects that complete our participation. Both of them are conceived and designed by two former students a graphic designer and an interior designer who graduated last year. Both projects play with the idea of imagination and how it could be creatively employed through vision and sound.