Affordances of Architectural Typology
A Call for Papers (by Drawings)
Andreas Lechner (TU Graz)
Gennaro Postiglione (Politecnico di Milano)
With this Call for Papers (by Drawings), we would like to collect contributions for a publication we will publish with the independent publisher Thymos Books in 2024. This atlas of Affordances of Architectural Typology will address both practitioners and scholars of architecture, and will be composed of contributions from both practitioners and scholars of architecture. Borrowing the key term of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, we understand affordance as the surface of the composition and layout of a building that directly constitutes what it affords. The correlation of architectural typologies with affordances is thus an index of longevity, as it illustrates how a building adapts to or enables different uses and habitation over time. With this call, we invite your suggestions for the inclusion of project documentation of building and research projects that illustrate this correlation. We want to explore processes of transformation through plans, sections and elevations of building adaptions, arguing that it is within drawing that we form and transform, adjust and reuse, upgrade and upcycle, i.e. that we read, negotiate and readdress “value” and “meaning”. (Gibson, 1979)
