Architecture and Interior Design Research Group

A+I Thinks: A critical spatial practice

Architecture and Interior Design are hybrid disciplines, always in precarious balance between “thing” and “thought”, between the body of the discipline and the constructed bodies of each instantiations – a building, a room, a city, a territory. A discipline that incorporates change is not only embracing new techniques, engaging with the present and anticipating futures; it is also constantly reconfiguring itself as a self-critique performed through its own making.

The Architecture and Interior Design Research and Knowledge Exchange group considers the role of research in creative spatial practices in the city, in society, and on the planet as a performative understanding of our world as it changes and responsibility. Ultimately it is the space for the constant questioning of the discipline itself – a locus of specific self- criticality. The different themes of A+I Research Group share the aspiration and responsibility to rethink spatial design beyond definition and enclosure, and as a nodal player and activator of tensions and relations, an unsettling ground for the discussion and the re-framing of spatial and creative practices at large, in architecture and interior design, and across the creative disciplines of Norwich University of the Arts.

Areas of focus:

• Making Histories — Today architecture is enveloped in a proliferation of histories and narratives. Architectural histories are being re-thought, deconstructed and reconstructed to embrace heretofore excluded perspectives, culture, geographies, languages and forms of expression.
• Making Theories — How do we practice theory in architecture, and criticality in space? Issues of interpretation and betrayal in representation and communication emerge, showing the ability of theory to transgress certain bounds of architecture, and to instigate disturbances that lead to contaminations and to the blurring of boundaries between forms of practice.
• Double-crossing — Every act of insight, imagination and innovation possible in architecture is a trace of a double-crossing, an intentional deceit and treacherous exposure between theory and practice. This is where what is inherited and experienced, the visible and the hidden, the constructed and the perceived, and the rethinking of their relations inform movements of conservation and revolution that shaped what we now know as architecture.
• Re:making Architecture — Design projects of “altering architecture” (Fred Scott), produce interventions that reuse, reclaim, revamp, historical structures and environments, reinventing approaches to resources and materials, as well as the way we use spaces and insert them in cycles of extraction and consumption. New material approaches expose architecture’s contested histories and entice environmental studies and new and re:newed material cultures.
• Architecture Is Conversation — The A+I Research Group organises lectures and seminars on crucial current topics. ‘Architecture Is Conversation’ is a series of transdisciplinary conversations for open and themed discussion on research and practice in progress. It provides a testing ground for projects and ideas, offering critical debate, counterpoints, and exposure.