Yes, And …

Knowlton School of Architecture, the Ohio State University
Undergraduate Option Studio, Spring 2018

The first rule of improv is to say “Yes, and...” You accept the conditions provided to you and you build upon them, you work with what you’ve got. Your success as a player lies in your ability to pivot seamlessly from one scenario to the next, to think laterally and to develop frameworks that are aware of how contingent meaning is on context. This is not unlike the work of an architect, who must reconcile competing stakeholder interests and demonstrate agility throughout the design and construction process. Improv is problem solving by shifting mental backdrops, by carefully tracking multiple potential meanings at once. 

The pun and the portmanteau will be our primary weapons in this improvisational battle, and we will investigate their operation as potential double agents, fulcrums around which meaning rotates. The pun is a play on context, a play on confirming assumptions by testing them against their surroundings.

 The portmanteau, on the other hand, is a conflation of two (or more) relatively stable terms into a new doubly-loaded one - Brexit, spork, turducken - even more powerful for having retained its recognizable original parts. If puns expose ambiguity as fundamentally baked into discourse and portmanteaux reveal its latent multiplicity, where are the stable referents?

With these two techniques in our arsenal, we will investigate and develop how subversive ideas might be baked into seemingly normative institutions. 

We will attempt to take lessons learned from improv and wordplay and apply them to all aspects of the studio, toward the end of proposing a contemporary mode of practicing architecture within ambiguous terms; we will use jokes to assert order within chaos.