Lecture date: 2002-01-18
In an attempt to throw off what it sees as conventional architecture’s unhealthy obsession with control, the projects of OCEAN NORTH embrace the ‘heterogeneity and unpredictability of today’s reality’.
Kivi Sotamaa examines the ‘de-coded’, abstract, material level of architecture and attempts to illustrate, through a number of collaborative projects, how architecture could be empowered by the production of a multiplicity of ‘decoded’ material effects rather than the use of culturally specific references.
Sotamaa discusses projects in which programme or function are not prescribed by the designer but are defined as a loose field of possibilities – a directionality of use – out of which the real performance emerges through real-time interaction between user and environment.
Kivi Sotamaa trained as a spatial/furniture designer and is one of the founding members of OCEAN NORTH, a multidisciplinary design and research organization based in Norway, Finland and the UK.
NB: Poor sound quality.
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