Meta Commentaries

“A quest regarding practice cannot be about overindulgent exercises that constantly try to go beyond architecture and avoid it altogether,” said NEMESTUDIO co-founder Neyran Turan during an “experimental” symposium at Carnegie Mellon University convened by visiting professor Zaid Kashef Alghata in late March. Nor, Turan added, would it do to continue “seeing architecture as heroic problem-solving.”

Such probing (and convoluted) statements abounded in each of the three sessions, which paired off presenters in intense dialogues that were then opened up to other participants and audience members. By toying with the symposium structure, Kashef Alghata hoped to achieve something like an “open workshop,” in which an object of study—a piece of writing, a physical object—could be used as a point of departure for speculation. For Turan (in conversation with Design Earth cofounder Rania Ghosn), that object was Richard Barnes’s Man with Buffalo (2007), a photograph of a diorama that depicts a man vacuuming fake snow around a taxidermied buffalo. “When you see a maintenance wor…