Suzanne Ewing

Inside Architecture from the Outside: Architecture's Disciplinary Practices

ABSTRACT The purpose and knowledge of architecture is primarily enacted through practice. This essay makes an original contribution to the discourse on inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary design practice research by asserting architecture’s skill in relation to utilization of its own and other disciplinary methods. Informed by the writings of Vittorio Gregotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Mark Linder a framework is established which consolidates and validates positions inside and outside architectural practice. The material practices of inside and the hybridized practices and emergence of new techniques of outside both contribute to possibilities of practicing inside architecture from the outside. Collaborative exchanges at disciplinary boundaries and beyond are argued to manifest and be made through disciplinary practice exchanges and attentiveness to technē, the “tools, techniques and technologies” of a discipline.

Intensification and Intimacy

Through a close reading of Blacktop: A Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard (1952), this paper aims, like the film, to suggest an urbanism of heightened sensation. An everyday material and action is intensified through a combination of staged and found circumstance. Intimacy is evoked through manipulation of visual and aural components of the cinematography. Close attention to the film reveals strategies for flattening, heightening and overlay that enable the imagination to shift temporally and materially between the solidified wash and ambiguous urbanity of 1950s asphalt to the particular qualities of often overlooked neighbourhood spaces, offering potential escape from mundanity.