Stephen Neille – Situating and Strangemaking ▶

This workshop is about grounding one’s work within a milieu – be it spatial, formal, typological, historical… through the lenses of ’strange making’ ‘editing’, and accretion. This Thinking Room sets aside any obsession over architecture’s novelty in favour of its consideration as a continuum – the ability to add, tweak, disturb, and reinforce extant conditions both physical and philosophical. The workshop is not about historicism, but understanding that the most powerful interventions might derive from a keen understanding and rephrasing of context: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his/her complete meaning alone… The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered…” (TS Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)