Three Little Shacks

The paper is premised upon the notion that tools and techniques have the potential to resist the premature prefiguring of problems and solutions in projectbased activity, with particular relevance in collaborative design practices. The architect’s métier and mode of knowledge production is marked by the capacity to make artefacts. Because our age is characterized by the imperative to innovate and evolve technically, architectural ideation must now engage an array of computationally-based tools for imaging, information management, simulation and fabrication. This paper, framed within the theoretical and productive context of a research-creation project, investigates the ontological status of process-work, speed, and the notion of failing fast through the prototyping of three small buildings, or shacks. It does this through a strategic choreography of factual and counterfactual investigations that give rise to fabricative knowledge incapable of being prescribed conceptually from the outset. It will be claimed that, in the case of architecture, the potential of technics to reflectively and playfully re-work things and ideas is also a participatory mode of ethical engagement