Revision, Expression
& Portfolio Design
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Your Dream Practice
Instructions:
1. Improvised Introduction
Image you will introduce a person to an audience at a conference. You’ve received 21 words and phrases that describe (a) what motivates their work (b) what kind of medium or discipline interests them and (c) what tactics, techniques, or approaches they take to accomplish their goals. Write a 180-210 word introduction.
2. Writing Back
You will be presenting to an audience at a conference. The organizers are very proactive, they’ve sent you a draft of a Practice Statement they plan to use for social media, a publication, and for speakers to introduce you to audiences. They are considerate and have requested your input. You are not entirely satisfed. Rewrite it. It must be no more than 210 words.
4. Language as a Medium of Communication:
Congratulations! Your edits have been accepted and your bio has been published. Perusing the conference materials you are now seeing the practice statements of others. In addition to conveying information, many statements intentionally leverage a narrative voice and tone in explicit or nuanced ways to communicate another layer of information -- e.g about personality, poetics, or emotions. In what ways does voice and tone alter your understanding or impression of their motivation, interests, tactics, and techniques?
Luckily you’ve received another invitation to speak. Rewrite your statement of practice for next week.
Example #1
If given the choice between staring blankly into space or reading architects’ office statements on their website, we choose the first. They all say the same thing: we’re sustainable, responsible with budgets, experienced, award-winning, etc…. The game seems to be how to say nothing in particular and comfort any worries of someone contemplating hiring you. After a few clicks, it’s hard not to think that all this quote-unquote professionalism is very cold at its core. We can’t tell you exactly when [____] started. We like to say it was 2003, sometimes we say 2005, but we were drifting from place to place, we didn’t have an office space then and our name was !@#?, which we quickly found was too difficult to use because 1. you couldn’t pronounce it and 2. you couldn’t get a Web address. In 2008, we were licensed and became a legal entity, but we had already had an office and made some buildings. At some point, we drifted towards [____] – an acronym of our names and reflection of a shared desire to be horizontal and fuzzy, as opposed to tall and shiny. We began around an oversized table, a surface for collecting, gathering, and working through a range of design experiments – a make-believe of architectural fantasies, problems, and thoughts. We are now located in New York, we have grown a little, but remain around a large table, working together on each project through playful experimentation and serious research. We have won some awards. We have written some books. We have built some buildings. We are currently making more. This website indexes that work: housing; schools; houses; cultural institutions; retail; exhibition design; installations; furniture; objects; books; writing; software experiments; and videos.
Example #2
[____] is a team of architects, thinkers, and makers. They gather around their love of people and objects—all things made, unmade, seen, unseen, dismissed. [____] upcycles. [____] makes sustainable, soulful architecture through the transformation of industrial infrastructural objects and systems. They work with the ordinary.
[____] ’s projects range from artists’ installations with artists; through families’ houses families; through communities’ cultural projects, civic institutions, and museums. [____] ’s practice has developed work from their hometown of New York City around the world, from Australia, through China to South Africa.
[____] ’s team is a tight-knit group of designers who bring their diverse voices, sensibilities, and heritages to this common project. [____] ’s founding partners, [____] and [____] , live and work in New York; grew up in Naples, Italy; teach at Columbia University’s GSAPP; and have been practicing together since 1993.
[____] ’s work has been recognized by awards and accolades, from the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices, to The New York American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Awards; and is featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. [____] ’s second monograph, in collaboration with Thomas de Monchaux and published by The Monacelli Press, is O+O: Objects + Operations.
Example #3
[____] is a conceptual artist and was born October 9th, 1953 in Paris, France.
Her father was an oncologist as well as an art collector while her mother was a book critic.
[____] studied under Jean Baudrillard instead of going to university and later found her love for photography.
After travelling in her twenties, she was inspired by the work of artist Duane Michals. She began working on photography, with no though or intent to pursue it as a career.
Her first established work, Suite Venitienne (1979), occurred when she followed a random man from Paris to Venice while disguised, secretly photographing him throughout the adventure.
Her work consists of following people around, obsessing over them and their actions, photographing them commonly without them knowing - in their natural habitat.
[____] work is not only of photography, but also literature. [____] is a successful writer with many books published, with her photography incorporated in some as well.
Today she teaches film and photography in Switzerland at the European Graduate School.