LOOPHOLES
Loopholes: within Discourse and Practice was held at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design over two days in April 2005 and was organized in collaboration with Ashley Schafer.
The loophole is a model of opportunistic deviance. Like lawyers exploiting contract ambiguities, financiers engaging in arbitrage, or accountants seeking tax shelters, the loophole is an opening for the dexterous professional. Borrowing this concept as provocation for architecture, the loopholes introduces an opportunistic use of architectures disciplinary constraints.
As architecture operates according to certain rules, codes, and standards internal to the discipline, the loophole is proposed as a strategy for constructive intervention enabled by, rather than restrained by, such autonomous laws. Loopholes do not arise from the negation of law, but instead are found and formed within its center. They are sites of potential within an otherwise closed system. Avoiding the naive call to abandon theory, the loophole can be understood as a reconsideration of the critical/projective divide. To this end we propose the the loophole, which depends on institutionalized laws in order to elude them, presents and advanced mode of practice, hyper-aware of the disciplines periphery as well as its hard-core.
The two-day symposium proposes four potential loopholes for architecture: geometry, geography, imaging, and effect. Through a mix of writers and practitioners, established and emerging voices, and critical as well as projective approaches, we hope to discover what it means to practice within the loophole.
Farshid Moussavi
Preston Scott Cohen
François Roche
Philippe Morel
Jeffrey Kipnis
Dave Hickey
K. Michael Hays
Sarah Whiting
J. Meejin Yoon
Helene Furjan
Yusuke Obuchi
George Baird
Mark Wigley
Antoine Picon
Ashley Schafer
John McMorrough
Amanda Reeser Lawrence
Sylvia Lavin
Mark Goulthorpe
Jeffrey Inaba
John May
Keller Easterling
Benjamin Aranda
Saskia Sassen
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
“Loopholes” was made possible through generous support from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Toshiko Mori.