Minimaforms Presents The Order of Time at the Architectural Association School of Architecture Gallery. It is an immersive installation aimed to connect the preoccupations of physics, art, and architecture by revealing the ordering of spaces and constructed relationships through direct experience.
Three Sculptural installations are the highlight of the exhibition. Spherical organizations deployed through mathematical logic and designed to extend space within reflective light boxes, gifting its viewer a new immersive moment at every turn. ArchDaily had the chance to engage in a conversation with Theodore Spyropoulos; Artist & Architect at Minimaforms and Director of the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab, on issues that tackled the interdisciplinary nature of architecture, the creative process of the installation, and how it influences the creation of spaces, buildings & cities.
Read on for the interview about the exhibition which is open from Friday 28 April 2023 to Saturday 3 June 2023 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture Gallery, London.
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Theodore Spyropoulos: My brother, Stephen, and I founded Minimaforms as a space to experiment. We have always believed that design should challenge convention and enable new relationships between people and their environments. To move beyond methods that reinforce the fixed and finite and embrace an approach towards design that is engaged and evolving. The studio is a laboratory at the crossroads of art, design, science, and technology that fosters shared and collective frameworks, foregrounding human and emotive experiences. We create space that enables curiosity, evolves, and allows for complex interactions to arise through human and nonhuman agency. Stephen is an artist and interaction designer and I was trained as an architect. We believe in participatory and enabling models of design that give users the capacity to influence and shape their environment. This is also evident in the work we've done over the years, such as Memory Cloud, Petting Zoo, Emotive City, and this current exhibition.
PY: How do you see architecture through an interdisciplinary approach in the practice and where is it situated within physics, mathematics, and art in general?
TS: Architecture is a very human pursuit. We've always approached disciplinary distinction with a degree of caution, within the work of Minimaforms. This is because we have always believed that a project or problem should be understood critically and conceptually, allowing this process to offer insight into how we should engage. Different disciplines offer varied ways of seeing and afford more complex relationships to be made legible with the means to address these challenges. This would lead us into works of atmosphere, earthworks, or robotics, whatever the path necessitated we are committed to following it wherever it may take us. We have approached architecture, art, and design from this perspective; if the problem is spatial, then it is architectural. So, interdisciplinary activity is not something that is an artificial thing. It is very much at the heart of how we have approached all problems.
PY: In a detailed sense, especially through some of your projects, for example, Memory Cloud, how is it situated within these disciplines to amplify space?
TS: We were approached by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) to create an installation and took the opportunity to propose an intervention in London to animate the built environment through conversation. Memory Cloud is based on the ancient practice of smoke signals — one of the oldest forms of visual communication fusing ancient and contemporary mediums. The project created a dynamic hybrid space that communicates personal statements as part of an evolving text, animating the built environment through conversation. Interaction is facilitated through messaging, allowing for an open, personal, and accessible medium for collective participation. We see design as assisting and challenging the inert built environment, enabling new relationships that give over the city to the people as a canvas for expression.
The piece, Memory Cloud was performed in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2008 and outside the Detroit Institute of Art in 2011. It remains one of our more radical interventions. The Telegraph said at the time that Memory Cloud was potentially one of the most obscene pieces of art ever to be performed in London. I think that review is symptomatic of how the work actually gave the public a voice. The piece opened up very important conversations around communication, expression, and collective agency. We saw it as an act that was really constructing the testimonials of everyday people as one form of collective expression.
Everyone can influence, no one can control.
PY: Now, in specific to this exhibition “The Order of Time” which originated as an invitation to craft a response to the late Yona Friedman's legacy. One of the influential architects & urban planners of the 1950s and 1960s widely known for the concept of Mobile architecture and his underlying philosophy of architecture being about people and behavior. How did you approach that with this exhibition?
TS: The work was originally commissioned as part of an exhibition that celebrated the life and work of Yona Friedman and was produced by Le Quadrilatère - Centre d’art de Beauvais, the Centre National Edition Art Image (CNEAI=) and the Frac Grand Large - Hauts-de-France in partnership with Idem + Arts and the Frac Picardie from the Yona Friedman Foundation. Our approach was to create a work that was in dialogue with some of his ideas that resonated with us and the curators. Namely, his interest in participation, enabling people to have agency, and his concepts, for example, of the spatial city. We looked at how he organized space, from circles and squares to some forms of orthogonal organizations, stacking, and linear attitudes toward collective development. We looked at the work that he was doing with projects like Flat Writer for the Osaka Expo and his work with the Architectural Machine Group while leveraging generative and behavioral approaches to computation. John Conway and his Game of Life was an important reference model for us in thinking about organization as we felt our response should offer a model to deal with the collective simultaneously and embrace the complexity of things. Everyone can influence, no one can control.
Situated between physics, complexity, and communication the work engages in our agency and understanding of the world. In 1969, George Spencer Brown published his seminal book Laws of Form, an attempt to straddle the boundaries between mathematics and philosophy in which he declared: ‘Draw a distinction and a universe comes into being.' In this one statement, the paradoxes of world-building and our relationship to it are outlined. If our understanding of the world is ours, then it remains, without action, inaccessible to others. The ‘world’, rather than something shared and understood, is plural, situated, and in continuous formation. Worlds within worlds are understood through a cosmology of observations.
The project itself takes the title, The Order of Time, from a book by Carlo Rovelli, who's a well-known quantum physicist working in quantum mechanics. Time is relative, and it's relational. Physics doesn't recognize a concept of past or future, it's always in the present. I think this is a very important descriptor, and it plays a role in how we responded to the invitation. It is a strategy of thinking about how space is created as something that is fundamentally adaptive, addressing latency and uncertainty as something that is embedded within its framework.
Everything we understand and see in the world is our own and is inaccessible to other people without action. So, in some ways, the way we understand the world is unique to us and necessitates communication.
PY: So just like your reference, John Conway’s Game of Life creates an illusion of a 2nd layer of reality moving through space, were you trying to create an experience where people, at every turn, get to experience a moment in time within the 3 sculptural installations?
TS: Conceptually, the three sculptures are moments in time. They are an analog instrumentalization of some concepts that we think are important. Everything we understand and see in the world is our own and is inaccessible to other people without action. So, in some ways, the way we understand the world is unique to us and necessitates communication. The sculptural interventions are really almost like looking glasses. You bring to it what you see. There isn't an image. It's not an object. It basically is a relational perceptual device. As you move around, it collapses the environment. We have to recognize those constructions are our own, and other perspectives are equally important. The piece, in terms of its immersion, is something as people are moving around the works, they will see not only the environment, with different perceptual effects, but they will also see radically different organizations in themselves; some fully mirrored, others expressing linear and radial organizations. The sculptures themselves, conceptually, are looking at different scales of resolution, and somehow embracing resolution space as a contemporary potential response to the understanding of world-building.
PY: This resolution and the relationship between things at a local level, how does it influence architecture? The creation of spaces, buildings, and cities?
TS: From my perspective, ever since I wrote the book, Adaptive Ecologies, my approach to urbanism has been to reject the concept of the master plan and blueprint. Historically they have never been realized and do not account for change or evolution. So, the idea was to look at mathematics and computation as a universally principled framework that could be understood at different scales. One that allows us certain affordances of adaptability from the unitary brick, conceptually speaking, to the building, to the city block, to the city. The concept of time from Rovelli’s book recognizes that from a physics point of view, there is no future or past. Everything is ever-present. So, the concept of design actually being very time-based and plural in its collective approach is very important to us. We try to demonstrate that through the film and the sculptures themselves that it's very much about thinking about evolutionary and adaptive principles in our understanding and engaging of our environments.
Any idea is an idea worth exploring collectively, but one should feel a responsibility to whom we’re designing for, why we're designing, and how that positively contributes to things.
PY: Finally, bringing the installation to the Architectural Association (AA), a space morphing into a new sense of community with physical relationships since the covid pandemic. How do you think the installation plays a role in communication and education?
TS: The AA and the history of the work of Minimaforms have had a parallel life. When I moved back to London and began teaching at the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the AA, we set up Minimaforms to, be a space for experimentation. We see knowledge as something shared and education as vital in enabling a conversation about complex things. The AA has always been a home, at least for me, for a kind of belief system that architecture matters and that people deserve better. Any idea is an idea worth exploring collectively, but one should feel a responsibility to whom we’re designing for, why we're designing, and how that positively contributes to things.
There's a certain degree of humility that one has to have when creating things for other people and a certain sensitivity to listen, but also a commitment, actually, to challenge the everyday.
We feel that architecture, design, and art enable an important voice and means of expression for the general public. We have used these installations as tools to bring people together and to have conversations that maybe are not so every day. Not only about art and architecture, but it could be about physics, it could be about the environment, and ecology, all utilizing the space of our intervention as their own. Architecture makes many demands. It's a very difficult endeavor because it's a very human one. But all of those paradoxes make it something that's very beautiful and something that brings people together in a unique way. I hope that people that visit the exhibition, in some sense, can be exposed in some sense to this. It was the reason I proposed the installation was shown here rather than anywhere else in London. To also show young students, who may have challenges with their own ideas and expressions, that these are the same problems that we have with my brother and the work that we do. There's a certain degree of humility that one has to have when creating things for other people and a certain sensitivity to listen, but also a commitment, actually, to challenge the everyday. The everyday is very habitual, and there are definitely reasons for that, but I feel that some problems have a degree of urgency. One that needs people to come together, to work on them collectively, and to bring their experiences as something that is fundamental to how we can progress not only in architecture but humanity.
