Workshop for potential architecture: Implications and opportunities for (re)constructing
Authors: Robbins Felix 
Published: December 2022

This article presents fragments of an ongoing research enquiry into the opportunities for reconstructing practice as a workshop for potential architecture (Oulipo). The projects presented develop from a completed Ph.D. thesis and explore models for architecture when conceived as an unstable, diverse and fluctuating activity through the theoretical work of my businesses as a-project and a-plot. The work is a constant architectural enquiry that seeks to challenge the persistence of reductive models of the discipline producing singular objects and associated constructions of legitimacy. The research instead reflects on practising as an active and ongoing enquiry for collective reinterpretations, references and opportunities between disciplines and environments – operating as speculative and projective essays that acknowledge the instabilities, contradictions and uncertainties inherent in designing anything. I continue to explore the potential in shifting the emphasis of architectural practice away from a reductive and deterministic model of production (with associated crises of value) and towards a dynamic, flexible and irresolute agency for practice that is reflective and involving. Models for architecture that are continuously responsive and embedded in the fluctuating environment of potential production (a broad interpretation of site as an evolving situation for practice and an ecology of diverse branching opportunities, contradictions and potential resolutions). The research develops these ideas for practice with a constant questioning and reframing of enquiry – an involving essay for practice – that branches across and through divergent material and referential frames and recognizes the inherent transdisciplinarity of any activity. The projects in this article explore the implications of a multiple situation derived from archetypical architectural conditions, originating narratives of architecture and theoretical rules where the apparent confidence that architecture constructs is revealed as a dynamic, unstable and involving translation. Through this process the language of the discipline is exposed – not fixed or certain, but shifting, blending, branching and interacting with a fluctuating network of situations and contexts. Drawing through and within (as digital and analogue mixtures) the complex interrelationships within the discipline of an architectural ecology reveals potential projections for architecture. Projections that recognize the contingent instabilities, elisions, modulations and episodic cadences of practice as a constant unfolding essay for practising. This article therefore argues for a dynamic agency for practice as a diverse, multiple and unstable activity that is constantly reframed, reconstructed and projected within shifting environments and contingent situations. It develops models for practice that are enabling, irresolute and speculative situations rather than fixed products – inhabiting partial, incomplete, transitory and implicit strategies for practising. This might expose architecture, dismantle the artificial constructions of reductive production and project possibilities for a more integrated and multiple workshop for potential architecture?