Ready-Made architecture processes

Ready-Made architecture processes
Collage by Tiago Ascensão
The project as a re-signification of the existing space or reality as an answer to the need

Tiago Ascensão
Guimarães, Portugal
About
Architect and researcher, looking for an architecture without construction, using reality as a resource.
Links
Field of work
Architecture, Ecology, Visual Art, Research
Project category
Raising awareness
Project submitted
2024

Tiago Ascensão is a PhD candidate at the EAAD - School of Architecture, Art and Design, Minho University (Portugal) and a member of the research group Lab2PT - Landscape, Heritage and Territory Laboratory

Master in Architecture by the Faculty of Architecture of Porto University (Portugal), he also studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin and at the Technische Universität Berlin (Germany)
He is co-founder of ORA Collective, a practice that emphasizes reality through ephemeral installations. (https://oracollective.weebly.com/about.html)
He was editor in the project “Dédalo 2017, Processos de Criatividade. sujeito - disciplina - circunstância” and participated in the research project “Prática(s) de Arquitetura: projeto - investigação – escrita”. (https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/bitstream/10216/147895/2/609487.pdf)

+ info:
https://tiagoascensao.weebly.com/about.html


The current infinitive development model is established on the over-exploitation of the territory and on the production of unnecessary elements. Considering the climate emergency faced, the architecture development urges to be based on alternatives that deny the exploitation of resources, whether are they material, energetic, or even human. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, it is explored the contribution of the artistic conceptual idea of the ready-made to an Architectural Project.
The research proposes to test the specific possibility of architectural practice solving the request and needs by maintaining the exact physical reality of the space, without building. The project takes place in the combination between reality and the look over it, as a process of intellectual construction of the existing reality, instead of physical construction. Transformation lies in a process of reality re-signification, emphasizing the potential of reality as a resource in itself. In this methodology, instead of drawing being the basic tool of architecture, the act of choice is the architectural practice and its design, as a result of critical reflection.
The research combines a practical character – through the exposure of existing practices combined and organized in an atlas of case studies – with a theoretical character – through the necessary creation of a specific vocabulary. Thus, recognizing re-signification as a project-response in the range of possibilities for the disciplinary practice of architecture it is created an area of knowledge that broadens the disciplinary field of architecture. This approach simultaneously emphasizes the emergence for a fundamental change in attitude towards the built environment by integrating this operative modality into a production system.