The lecture will be dedicated to the concurrent exhibition Tendency and Fact in Carpintarias de São Lázaro. Appropriating a phrasing of Andre Leroi-Gourhan, it is dedicated to the interplay of city and prototype. As expressions of tendency and fact, city and prototype yield an understanding of architecture as device, constituted by both the material and the immaterial, the built and the non-built, the human and non-human. These relations are explored through architecture’s visible and invisible effects, eliciting a reflection on the entanglement of energy, material, and our modes of their perception.

Recent projects from the office as well as from the research studio at EPFL establish a constellation that questions the performativity of the built environment, its effects on us which we commonly consider not to be us. The exhibition is conceived as an attempt to find a new sensitivity of how we perceive and apprehend architecture and energy through an interplay of city and prototype, tendency and fact.