Choreography as a tool to understand architectural situatedness: a mediating intervention at Hiedanranta industrial heritage site, Finland

Abstract

This contribution takes the notion of situated experience as a starting point for explorations in practices of moving and making. Striving to privilege embodied experience and situated meanings, this contribution presents an experimental educational project at a former industrial site in Finland. The on-site intervention has been developed by the Master of Architecture research and design studio ‘Transdisciplinary Encounter: Choreographing Architectural Values’ by combining philosophical reflections on the experience of place and situation with a practical perspective. Twenty-four students from the studio based at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) worked in a context that encompassed a former pulp factory and a manor house in Tampere, Finland. Engaging this urban site in the direct vicinity of forests and lakes, and foregrounding our bodies’ capacity to ‘make space’, the studio explored research and making methods derived from the field of dance and choreography, particularly focusing on the relationship between movement and ‘situatedness’.