Notational(AND)scapes

According to American academic and architectural theorist Bryan Cantley, his speculative architectural drawings are: … trying to break the boundaries of the rules that practitioners are trying to use. So, in a general sense, if we potentially can loosen up the understanding of the ruling systems that are given to us as architects, maybe we can adopt different strategies for how we might negotiate that. I would argue that if we can do that, that will create different types of architectural spaces. (Cantley, “Speculative Dialogues 11 Jan 2023” Interview) Cantley’s drawings re-present architecture as continually transforming spatial, temporal, and contextual conditions. His goal is to prompt architects to reconceive architecture from a new perspective, and in that sense, learn new ways to design new types of architecture. Cantley incorporates issues relating to ‘dualism’, to provoke opposing forces to be readdressed in new ways. He incorporates strategically situated ‘architectural notation devices’ to imply three-dimensional architectural volumes that are undergoing temporal and spatial transformations. These notation devices—familiar to practicing architects—are applied in unexpected ways to prompt new ways of conceiving architecture. Cantley incorporates notions of ‘liminality’ as a device from which he can explore the technological, perceptual, spatial, and temporal possibilities of architecture. To test Bryan Cantley’s theoretical proposition, this design-led thesis investigation looks to reinterpret Cantley’s two-dimensional drawing Camera Noxoculo: The manifest of the Sanctum(etrics)—which represents multiple spatial and temporal conditions occurring simultaneously—as a three-dimensional work of architecture sited within a dynamic temporal field. The aim of this thesis investigation is to examine how Cantley’s application of his three principal speculative devices—liminality, architectural notation devices, and dualism—can be re-applied to digitally re-create Cantley’s two-dimensional speculative drawing Camera Noxoculo as a three-dimensional speculative outcome. This thesis asks: How can Bryan Cantley’s speculative architectural drawing Camera Noxoculo be used as a prompt by an architectural designer to arrive at “different strategies for how we might negotiate … different types of architectural spaces”?