Concrete Geometries  —
spatial form & social relations

Contemporary digital architectural design is characterized by an understanding of geometry as logico-algebraic text out of which architectural form emerges through the manipulation of data. By looking at the etymological roots of mathematics, the author of this text relates geometry back to bodily experience and the question of spatial orientation.

Antony Coleman’s photographs explore social clusterings in everyday spaces, whether in an infants gym where the protagonists ‘find a space’ to operate independently of each other or in the urban setting of Canary Wharf. The processes that structure these geometries can be practical such as a need to function unhindered or be based on the desire to maintain a personal space. Space and people are rendered entirely dependant upon each other – people’s behaviour is determined by their shifting surroundings but space, too, is provisional: it is human activity that defines, informs and qualifies space, ie that articulates it. Anthony Coleman is a photographer based in London.

While critical practice suffers from ‘design deficits’ and digital practice remains locked within design processes according, the ‘concerned practice’ could be a possible mode of operation for an architecture concerned with the real. Thinking architecture through the notion of agency, Doucet argues for an ‘idiotic architecture’ and the emergence of unexpected events.