A Framework for Serendipity

In a field ruled by passing fads and recognized by cookie-cutter styles, it is difficult to escape from a trend and identify a productive methodology towards exploration. The work of a designer is always going to be styled to what they know and what they’ve seen, a feedback loop of aesthetics. In the end, it is too easy to relate and emulate something as procedural as architecture, where the formula is necessary to publicize and distribute in order to get business and keep designing. How can the hand of the architect be eliminated, but still play a role in the final product? There exists a necessity to abandon authorship when designing and instead adopt a methodology of co-authorship in order to further research and avoid stagnation.

Co-authorship entails two parts to the process; the first is the initial product, or the site. The second is the intervention and design. In his installation Splitting, Gordon Matta-Clark installs architecture into an existing building, becoming the creator of the work, after there already being an architect. By this example, the architect can be the beginning or the end of a design, and the title of architect can change over time. It is productive to consider architecture as something that is not meant to be permanent, whether it be through the forces of time or the cultural perception of a work, the idea of the building is bound to be altered. To prepare for the inevitability of a building to change should also be the role of an architect, as part of the design.

Research into the entropy of architecture and the Idea of a building leads to a desire to force serendipity. If the building is understood as something to be destroyed, then the result over time should be well designed and thought out. To produce the framework for creation allows for the Architect to fulfill their role and install a constant level of creative agency. The architect who designed the vernacular colonial-style home edited by Matta-Clark had no say in the final product of his work, relinquishing the title of architect. Although authorship is to be relinquished, co-authorship should be considered inclusive of both parties in the process.

With a relinquishment of authorship, the designer must consider the amount of creative agency that is installed into the framework. The artistic mediums of painting, photography, and drawing are useful in describing agency in a co-authored work. Between mediums exists gaps that are not clearly demarcated or defined, and where the architects work can reside. There is a tension produced by working between mediums, as fewer decisions are made for you. The work can be simultaneously designed, disorderly and undefined