Design and enfictionment experiencing a hybridizing strategy in architectural prospects

Abstract

This chapter questions and investigates the links that exist between the two now widespread fields of architectural design and fiction emerging in prospective academics and practices. In an academic situation, we here observed three productions of students in a master's degree program at the School of Architecture of Lyon, ENSAL, France. By creating a video tale, the produced projects bear a temporal dimension which re-introduces a linearity into a prospective strategy. Indeed, during the last decade, parametric and advanced tools for modeling in design stages (CAD/CAM) have injected a complexity which eluded the crystallization of forms in the conception timeline. That is why, as an experimental process aiming to generate singular cultural and technical habits in architecture, students were asked to produce a film, activating this way a creative dimension by maintaining a singular linearity in time by fiction. These fictions are integrated into our research as a line of attack raising rationality with a view to sharpen architectural materiality prospects. Such prospects follow the MAP-Aria laboratory studies on computation potentials in architectural design processes. The layout of a written chapter does not allow the presentation of samples of animated pictures. That is why, a large amount of screenshots were retrieved from the movies.