A new exhibition at the Harvard Graduate School of Design by Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz (Ábalos+Sentkiewicz) will explore Dualisms in architecture: the notion that most historic architecture takes its "composite tension from two theoretically incompatible morphological organisations that correspond to different disciplines or languages." Suggesting that these organisations can possess elements of "compatibility and incompatibility" simultaneously, the appearance of "a kind of hybrid 'Frankenstein's monster'" is characterized by dualism in architecture. For the curators, Dualisms act not only performatively, but also in a creative and composite way. "They are, at once, constraints and formative opportunities."
According to Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz:
Only recently, when bringing together the sections of two projects in the publication of a monograph about Logroño Intermodal Station and its urban park, did we see the similarities in a design technique that was corroborated by introducing a third element—the section of Huafa Art Museum in Zhuhai. This use of a dualistic system that spans not only lexical and iconographic territories but also tectonics and thermodynamics multiplies its public collective functionality.
These examples maintain a tension that is applied to the composite and typological elements that exist between the public and the private domains, between energy demand and the need for dissipation, between their position inside and their need to emerge to the exterior. The result is a conflict of compatibilities between lightness and mass, natural elements and thermal devices, form and performance. We like to think that this dualistic combination not only serves to generate prototypes that contribute to a new notion of quality, but also provides some answers to the shortcomings facing the new metropolises and their inhabitants.
Watch a lecture by Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz, plus a conversation with Enrique Walker, below:
The exhibition will run until the 8th March 2015 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
