provisional construction

The challenges to architecture provoked by global environmental change can be understood not as a set of poorly understood constraints but as a real possibility for creativity: for building more with much less, for providing a new sense of the permanent as the ongoing and provisional.

We might think of architecture therefore as provisional construction. This invites us to explore cities in a different way – to deploy and test the strategies of re-use, of making-do, of alternative provisions and to generate material and ephemeral responses, which have a resourceful permanence.

This kind of architecture requires an assemblage of different inputs and potentialities. Its participative dimension encourages a drafting of architecture by many – wherein a redrafting is always to be expected.

Provisional construction encourages the possibility of experimental openness in the process of designing rather than thinking of design as the reproduction of an already defined knowledge.

Provisional works generate more questions than answers, involving critical reflection of how both the materialisation of the process and imaginative participation in it has extended and developed the initial proposition.

Such constructions occur prior to any possibility of building. Their experimental gestures allow the discovery of specific responses to what could or should be made.

Provisional constructions have the potential for the transformation of a public and a city. They recall the tradition of carnival and its ephemeral festival constructions. They evoke satire and the capacity for political commentary.

A provisional construction is nervous about its own existence. It acknowledges its indeterminacy, its redundancy and its uselessness. It continually undermines itself as if the only way to be credible in the current context is with irony.

The notion of provisional construction is deliberately evasive – it is a concept in proviso.

Renata Tyszczuk