The Gap Dance

If the end goal of architecture is life,

how can life be built before it is lived?

Architecture exists in so far as its subjects participate. Its subject can be an individual, a dumpster, the contours of a landscape, or even a line of flood water. The architect is a good narrator, someone who reads the gaps between these lives.

This is a dance of the gap across three sites in Melbourne, Australia.

In Carlton, the subjects move at a fast pace. By correlating the already-existing things onsite, the programs of a home emerge in a service lane: the shower, the toilet, the bed, the kitchen, and the bike store. Here, architecture is already.

In Kew, the slow and ecological landscape is the author. Architecture only comes near completion as we patiently wait for a-hundred-year flood. The line of water participates in the forming of the bike path, the burial, and the wedding. Here, architecture is always.

In the city centre, we resume at our usual speed.

How to be an architect when the subjects of architecture are both fast and slow?

How does architecture take part in the scope of life that is both volatile and infinite?

This is what ‘The Gap Dance’ is about.