Unfixing Architecture: An Open-Ended Conversation

Architecture is something which is often viewed as a stagnant object in an unchanging landscape, dismissing its place within a wider ecological web. This research explores the implications of an architecture that is in full realisation of its part in an ongoing ecology of relationships through an application of ‘unfixity’. Unfixing proposes architecture as an open-ended conversation. The thesis explores strategies for unfixing architecture, allowing their natural creative agency to emerge, which fosters an open-ended exploration of strategies for shifting architecture’s fixity. In order to define and uncover these strategies, an iterative and experimental design approach has been employed as the overarching methodology.

The conversation of this thesis begins with voices of literary and physical practice that provide an understanding of ‘unfixing’ within the context of the thesis. These are established at the beginning of the conversation and continue to echo and reverberate throughout the conversation as it is charged by the design experiments. Critical reflections on the various design experiments, outcomes and iterations have continuous voices within the thesis, deeply informing the overall focus of the conversation and research. The design experiments traverse a range of mediums and scales, testing and twisting the strings of unfixing to extract an understanding of the concept. This twisting and testing culminates in a public building as the final outcome. This building is pulled into being by relationships found within its rich site-specific ecology; it fosters and enhances these relationships while remaining open to the ever-changing push and pull of new site relationships. Between the hours of 10 am and 11 am on Monday, the Thirteenth of November, this architecture finds itself operating as a bike shed and watch tower.

Creating an architecture that is built through relationships, remaining open to swift and unpredictable change of these relations feels extremely pertinent in our current world of snap technological updates and sudden climate degradation. Mundane quotidian movements, so old and persistent that they have worn deep grooves into their environments, can become irrelevant and erased without trace in an instant: architecture must be placed to react to these unfixed traces.