The Urban Exploratory Circus: Infrastructure for Corporeality, Connectedness and Virtuosity

20 It is a common observation that the "profession" of architecture is in a state of crisis. Architects who wish to influence society struggle in an increasingly media-oriented culture to find expression within the limited language of building. Central to the perceived threat are not media technologies themselves but the notion of speed which these technologies evoke, an intangible and persistent movement which opposes the static nature of architecture. Through their speed and mutability media technologies facilitate progressive thought; architecture, meanwhile, is co-opted by conservative power structures in society and creates predominantly slow, permanent structures. Even in its focus on "profession" rather than "practice," architecture has fallen into a conservative position, declining to acknowledge crisis and adopt change. By focusing on permanent structures, architecture ignores temporality and mobility; by limiting itself to building structure and enclosure, architecture loses the expansive and integrating vision of total design. Viewing projects as singular object buildings, architecture forgets a systemic approach to the larger scale. Traditional typologies are no longer a viable framework for architectural design; complex programs change much faster than traditional architecture. 'Form follows function' is reductive and broadly assumes a predictability of function. Architecture Is seldom, if ever, used only for its intended purpose. lMlJli|i Hence, architecture needs a new, strategic approach to form and program, one less prescriptive and more suggestive in which an organic system of constraints determines where and how building occurs. An individual designer's skill is one of these overlapping