Roundtables are initiated by myself and/or participants of current or previous roundtables. A subject is brought to the table that either has to do with a participant’s personal research or satellite curiosity for experimental or collective practices.

Roundtables combine individual work on a complex research project on issues of sonic, poetic and spatial development with a collaborative discursive environment where ideas, materials, and individual projects are discussed and evaluated.

The form of the roundtable is experimental and iterative: while focus will be maintained on the general framework of critical analysis and practice- based intellectual work, the impetus is on creative appropriation of resources and technologies of representation, documentation, networking, archiving, de-archiving and re-archiving.

Learning outcomes

• Development of a substantial practice-based research investigation that combines on-the-ground fieldwork with theoretical insights and critical reflections.
• Exercise your knowledge of critical research methodologies in developing research projects.
• Draft and refine research questions, and creatively articulate and develop the research findings.
• Engagement in peer-to-peer learning through collaborative work and self-organised initiatives.
• Training and application of practical skills necessary to conduct the research (this may be accomplished through workshops with invited facilitators & instructors).
• Elaboration of the student’s own practice within a number of intellectual traditions.
• Organise complex research materials and critically evaluate them.
• Read critically in order to evaluate complex arguments and theories.
• Present conclusions and interpretations about that reading and individual research in an informative and well-organised presentation.
• Knowledge of a set of intellectual problematics relating to the architectural pedagogy from outside its conventional disciplinary framework.
• Undertake independent research with minimum guidance and be skilled in critical collaborations with researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds.
• Write and produce a well-structured dissertation project that provides evidence of independent research, makes an argument clearly and effectively, presents original ideas and conclusions, and uses standard style for referencing.
• Transferable skills include the capacity to critically analyse complex spatial and social situations, produce well-structured documentation of research process and methodologies, that combine a variety of media for documentation purposes, including a demonstrable capacity for producing complex visualisations of research materials.

Documentation

The development of individual projects hinges around the collection, production and organisation of complex research materials, stemming from a variety of sources and fields. The aim of these Roundtables is to critically engage with these materials in order to analyse and evaluate them in the light of a clear argumentation.

The Roundtables will in particular focus on the development of innovative spatial representation technologies and methods, enquiring in the relation between the technologies to detect and represent change and the institutional, cultural and juridical modifications they entail.

Beyond the opportunity of displaying and producing a final product, the Roundtables also aim at experimenting with innovative and critical processes of documentary practices of the complex artistic and cultural research procedures activated in the seminar. Specific focus will be given to the relation of the documentation with both the external processes investigated and the internal disciplinary activities of artistic, architectural and cultural enquiry.