‘It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationess, community interest or cultural value are negotiated.’  Bhabba, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, p. 2.

‘Every moment of (a) story has a conscious relationship with (a) normal language and its belief system, is in fact set against them, and set against them dialogically…this dialogic tension…permits authorial intentions to be realized in such a way that we can acutely sense their presence at every point in their work.’  Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 314.

The construct of inclusive disjunction, drawn from discourse on logic, recognizes a complex condition in which one or more propositions within that condition can be true; the veracity of one proposition does not necessarily negate the veracity of another. What inclusive disjunction suggests is a conceptualization, and indeed an embrace, of the multiple and conflicting aims and needs (and even multiple realities) that can reside in the context of making place.

The city of Innsbruck provides a fertile laboratory in which to explore this praxis. With a history as a crossroads between east and west, north and south, and of nature and culture, the city has absorbed the interjection of disparate attitudes and ideas while simultaneously giving birth to its own essence. It this context we can observe the permeability of local cultural traditions and the malleability of new interventions. We see this evidenced in both the inherited fabric of the city, and more recent projections of globalized architecture.

Central to this project will be an interrogation of tectonics (i.e., of materiality and the act of making) as practiced within Innsbruck. This inquiry will underpin the generation of designs for a live project, affording both individual and collective expression, culminating in the realisation of an exhibition framework at the end of the term. This framework will accommodate the intervention, both through representation and production, of architecture students from outside the University of Innsbruck.

This layering of spatial-form and making speaks of the nature of practice today; we increasingly operate across boundaries which challenge us to simultaneously negotiate cultural traditions and the avant-garde, while previously connected processes in the act of building have become distended over time and place.