Alternative Realities

It can be argued that one of the main goals of architecture is to create a new reality—a reality that challenges our preconceptions of reality and the standard notions we have of artificial and conventional environments. One of the topics this workshop focuses on is the concept of reality. In contemporary architectural discourse over the past decade, particularly through object-oriented ontology, the concept of reality has been revisited. The interest of a group of leading and young architects in this philosophical discourse has shifted architectural thought towards concepts such as strangeness. Another idea explored in this workshop is the concept of the “cutting object.” The cutting object diagram is a spatial strategy with ancient roots, but in recent decades, it has been consciously employed as an alternative to modern and postmodern spatial strategies. In this workshop, historical examples (works from traditional Iranian architecture) will be used as a starting point for the design process.