TACK / Communities of Tacit Knowledge

TACK, Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing is a newly funded Innovative Training Network, as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions within the European Framework Program Horizon 2020. It trains young researchers in understanding the specific knowledge that architects use when designing buildings and cities. TACK gathers ten major academic institutions, three leading cultural architectural institutions as well as nine distinguished architecture design offices. Collaboratively these partners offer an innovative PhD training program on the nature of tacit knowledge in architecture, resulting in ten parallel PhD projects.

Architecture and the built environment extends beyond the immediately physical, orientating ways of knowing. It leaves a residue, poor images, poor connections, trace impressions, wobbly lines, rough outlines.

Active Form focuses attention toward what things do, the affordances of shifting dispositions, the potential brought out by particular choreographies, repertoires, and arrangements. It attempts to recognize positionality, looking at the distances between things, their relations and interactions amongst moving constellations to better understand the thing and its patterns, structures, power relations, aesthetics, the tensions that hold things in place.

These patterns of action and relation build a languaged spatial matrix. They trace the interplay and entanglements of position, orientation, and inclination. An unsettled strata of relations. To read together Keller Easterling and Marshall McLuhan together, “the action is the form”. This is not meant to exclude the specific characteristics of form, but to reorient how we understand what something is by also including what it does in which constellations and contexts. The aesthetic of this direction is not bound by finished and secured forms, but rather emerges from a visual language of relations in constant negotiation.

Creative Direction & Design: Johnny Chang

Designed in dialogue with Tom Evermate, Janina Gosseye, and Korrina Webber. Module materials and Module 3. Teaching in dialogue with Tim Anstey, Klaske Havik, Jennifer Mack, and Helena Mattson.

Doctoral Students: Hamish lonergan (ETH), Ionas Sklavounos (UAntwerp), Paula Stründen (ABKW), Mara Trübenbach (AHO), Anna Livia Vorsel (KTH), Filippo Catapan (BUQ), Jhono Bennett (UCL), Caendia Wijnbelt (LUH), Claudia Mainardi (Polimi), Eric Crevels (TUD).

Documentation Photography: Robert Damisch