Dialogue Box | A Drawing Machine

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BRIEF

2013 MURRAY & ROBERTS DES BAKER ARCHITECTURE STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

The 2013 Murray & Roberts Des Baker Architecture Student Design Competition brief challenges architecture students to design, build and install a full-scale Dialogue Box as a kit-of-parts, not exceeding the spatial boundaries of the six square faces of a regular hexahedron measuring 2.5m x 2.5m x 2.Sm (h x I x d).

The Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free Slate will serve as the hypothetical client for the Dialogue Box. The Institute's vision, mission and research framework may be consulted for guidance.

Through the Dialogue Box a place is to be constructed where individuals come together to speak, to dialogue, to share their stories, to struggle together within social relationships that strengthen rather than weaken the possibility for active citizenship on the individual campuses.

Although the Dialogue Boxes should address the unique place phenomena of each university, the boxes must be able to be taken apart as a kit - of-parts and re-installed on tile campus of the University of the Free State (on a level site) during the National Student Congress (NSC'13).

A DRAWING MACHINE

The first abstraction of dialogue is the intellectual dialogue with the brief, the design proposal and the materialisation thereof.

Participants assemble 3D manuscripts which are inscribed with meaning, nostalgia and deal with the outlined themes.

These vessels are contained in our larger cube and come to represent a further abstraction: metaphysical conditions, thoughts, places and times become flattened.

These contributions are further rationalised to become weights participating in the performance of our harmonograph. The immensity of real dialogues and happenings becomes a drawing produced by a calculated device (a three pendulum harmonograph).

The dialogue takes place on cadastral maps; embedded with historical layers and meaning. The new drawing that originates resembles an inclusive and dynamic conversation about social and spatial conditions.