Spatial Blooms

‘Spatial Blooms’ (Figures 1 and 2) is research by design work undertaken through the generous support of the University of Michigan’s Taubman College ‘Research Through Making’ grant programme. This article discusses work that explores the possibility of inscribing indeterminacy and varied temporal logics, borrowed from landscape, into architecture. It foregrounds the potential of an evolving architecture that stimulates relationships that might be generated through its existence – temporally active germinal formations, loaded and ready to go. Design efforts study this potential using landscape ready-mades; specifically, landscape’s organizational principles, landscape elements and landscape ‘biologies’, as well as their capacities to engender change, enfolded through design. Ultimately, such architecture would facilitate variable and changing spheres of influence, activated in time. The work trades on the richness of landscapes at cultural, experiential and operational levels, investigating ways in which landscape properties can find their way into architectural speculations. It explores the cross-pollination of landscape properties into architecture through three specific lenses: (1) developing specific visualization techniques to evolve the work; (2) using language prompts to activate design possibilities; and (3) analogous thinking as a design method. ‘Spatial Blooms’ discusses several relationships to the journal’s theme, ‘Sentient Relic’. It suggests spatial and material formations that exist in various phases, or phase states, oscillating between instructional and visceral forms of communication; it offers the possibility of non-anthropocentric spatial logics by augmenting perspective as a dominant spatial apparatus and by initiating relationships through non-anthropocentric landscape characteristics; and it explores an alternative architectural approach in relation to the fixed functional or formal relations of architecture based on typological classification. It is grounded by using ecological thinking as a generative metaphor, suggesting that life might exist somewhere between closed systems and open, shared and active environments. In sum, the work attempts to inscribe alternative temporal logics, change and indeterminacy into speculative architectural settings to activate habitual spatial practices. It attempts to seduce the unknown and provoke curiosity. As a result, it invokes active spatial participation. It studies this possibility by using ready-made landscape characteristics, analogously. Eventually, landscape behaviours, or landscape ‘biologies’, will be injected into the visualizations featured in this article. The cultural, disciplinary and experiential durability of landscape plays important roles in exploring the use of landscape ready-mades toward new architectural possibilities.