The relationship between dust and architecture has always been ambiguous. As the other – a trace of the outside, a threat to the definition of form – dust is ignored, removed or feared. And yet dust is made, also and largely, of architecture. Vice versa, dust interferes with, seeps into, unsettles, but also develops a possibility for architecture, as it questions the definition of its form, as well as the structural and temporal stability of its construct. 

A reconsideration of the relationship between architecture and dust invites a trans-scalar thinking of the material in architecture, from the microscopic definition of what constitutes architectural materiality, to the explosion of the object and of perspectival vision as a form of control (and a control of form). 

Architecture_Dust considers dust as a material agent of the undoing of form, an index of the disruption of social conventions of gender, privacy and domesticity, and of different economies of the body, architecture and the city, and as a critical and disruptive tool of what remains after the explosion of architecture’s established orders – the architectural object and its representations, space and its definitions – but no longer belongs to them.

Biography:

Teresa Stoppani is an architect and architectural theorist based in London. She teaches at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and at the Leicester School of Architecture, De Montfort University. She has taught architectural design and theory at the IUAV University of Venice, the University of Technology Sydney, RMIT University Melbourne and in several UK universities. Teresa’s research explores the relationship between architecture theory and the design process in the urban environment, and the influence on the specifically architectural of other spatial and critical practices. Her writings are published internationally in edited books and in academic journals. She is the author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge 2010) and Unorthodox Ways to Think the City Representations, Constructions, Dynamics (Routledge 2019) and co-editor of This Thing Called Theory (Routledge 2016). She is an editor of The Journal of Architecture (RIBA/Routledge), and co-founder of the architecture research collective ThisThingCalledTheory.