Alex Montgomery – Negotiations of Preference: Structure, Construction, Architecture ▶

In the act of building – or indeed in the planning of building – we experience the preferences of architecture, structure and construction interacting, creating intersecting feedback loops which oscillate throughout the project development. Multiplicities of potential material, form, scale, access, use, time, cost, but also agenda, ethics, and bias, all inform disciplinary preference and dictate their strength and directionality. Rarely the hinderance it seems, the negotiation of disciplinary preferences (loosely-held, firmly-held) presents constant opportunity for truly cross-disciplinary design to emerge.

And it is fluency in the disciplinary vernacular of the other that permits access and enables the process to be productive rather than destructive – or perhaps destructive to be productive? – and in so being generates further possibility of interaction, and so on. Examining precedent works (across the multiplicities) through the combined lenses of structure, architecture and construction works to generate a universal fluency that is to be repurposed and redeployed in the negotiations of preference.