WORKING ARCHITECTURE GROUP [WAG]

Archetypal Space

By Archetypal Space we understand the core of the architectural discipline: steps and platforms that one can sit on or lie down on, basic changes in level, frames and physical enclosure. These are the basic, fundamental components of all of our work, whether designing landscapes, homes, or thinking about haptic digital interfaces. Archetypal space is a function of morphology, of our human bodies in space, and of our socio-spatial practices. It is the space occupied and required by the most basic human activities such as standing, siting, viewing and moving. It is the most fundamental way that architecture acts as an interface or prosthesis, an extension of the body. Archetypal Space can perhaps be understood, following biologist Richard Dawkins, as our ‘Extended Phenotype’. Dawkins suggests that the environments that animals produce, such as bird’s nest, spider’s webs etc, are expressions of genes in the same way that wings, fingers legs etc are… spatio-constructional impulses hardwired into genes.
Archetypal space is in some ways the basic language of architecture. The work of many of the more interesting modernists used abstraction, primitivism, and products of children and the ‘outsiders’ in what was arguably their search for the basis of a modern archetypal and therefore universal language of communication. Some of the early work of the expressionists was concerned with this. Le Corbusier was preoccupied with these questions, especially in his later work. Such thinking was vital to the work of many of the postwar Dutch ’structuralist’ architects such as Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger, and it was Karin Jaschke’s anthropological presentation of the work of these architects within the Polytechnic studio that first raised this question. We had realised that whilst kinaesthetics could describe some experience of spatial morphology, it tended to apply only to certain scales… and didn’t capture everything that was produced by morphology. In the studio, we shifted some of the focus of pattern research away beyond decoration or environmental performance towards an exploration of what we called archetype and ecology. By spatial archetype we understood the fundamental ways that morphology organises human bodies not simply kinaesthetically, but socially, into ecologies…
At WAG, we initially framed a related study under a questioning of Flexibility, firstly in the workplace proposals for WHSmith, later for the Truman Brewery Playground project (although it structures much other work).
In these projects we combine a fixed base archetypal landscape with a flexible superstructure. The flexible superstructure in projects like Truman are obviously quoted from Price, Archigram etc. but with critical addition of a fixed articulated base landscape. We considered these environments to be properly architectural cybernetic systems…