We’re at a moment desperate to find a language and methodology outside of the dominant culture. The culture of wealth, extraction and attending security can appear unfelt in many quarters. By extension there is labor in updating our systems of measurement. To wildly oversimplify, the values shaping architecture and acting on the body are different in different places but we wish to humbly examine what we think about ourselves, head to toe, one hand to another. Globalization, like modernism, suggests that we are qualitatively the same as consumers and different as producers. This is inequality. As a design position we seek to celebrate ourselves together. There is stripping down and then building up and then some stripping down again. We recognize scarcity and constraint while also imbuing our actions, objects and spaces with value, if not pleasure.

Starting with the body ends in living. Every program, assumption, and standard lies in between. Our search, as a workshop, aspires to a documentation of and celebration with intention. This, the body, begins with cleaning together and not cleaning together, action with joy, where decisions are made from a mess’ creation to that same mess’ resolution. This process that we all go through every day and every year is negotiation within cycles. In so doing we ask what we require; how clean does something have to be, what drives that order and what are its consequences. Mary Douglas in ‘Purity and Danger’ wrote that “Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, insofar as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements... It is a relative idea.” The idea that we are always returning to a given order is embedded in our actions. Everything that we value is learned, and we learn imagination by practicing imagination. Our studio would seek to transform our everyday lives through the cycles of celebration and retreat. Celebration might be making a sandwich and retreat, in this case cleaning the plate. By extension we are interrogating our privilege and the codes that make inside or outside, ours or shared, and comfortable or uncomfortable.

The workshop can be at several scales but is specific to the body. It would be camping indoors and living outside. It would be giving things up and having much more than we need. The projects would in all cases be architecture to form new habits, new responsibilities, and new risks. We would build some ovens (first) and cook of course.