“My course has not only been a and an opportunity to engage with wide range of tutors, researchers and even other courses and disciplines which enriches your work.”
Hi Jordan, please tell us a bit about your work, your influences etc
“In my final year of my Masters, both my design thesis and research specialisation project have stemmed from an autoethnographic study I conducted in response to my experience on site in the Ashdown Forest.
“Autoethnography is in simple terms an ethnographic study of the self, this experience was particularly interesting and poignant to me since I’m in a wheelchair, and the difficult act of moving through an uncultivated landscape led me to question topics of ontology, epistemology and embodiment.
“My final research essay The Floor Is Lava: An Autoethnographical Study of Non-Normative Embodiment and the Entangled Ontologies of Body, Tool and Landscape was an in depth reflection and analysis of this study and was influenced by the work of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Tim Ingold.”
“My final design thesis project took similar inspiration from this experience but was used to develop a contextual design response. Another moment of site research led me to a series of forest clumps, which are dotted around the Ashdown Forest. These clumps due to various ecological factors provide a much more accessible ground condition than the surrounding landscape and therefore my project set out to develop a proposition in order to grow and extend a new accessible woodland infrastructure. The project narrative is set in 2040, where the custodian of this infrastructure, a semi-autobiographical character, has been left abandoned and isolated in this woodland.
“The ongoing desire to keep expanding the woodland via a unique timber structure which facilitates various silvicultural processes, requires the assistance of other characters, and thus the primary custodian begins to create another being. Utilising new technologies which were invented to allow socially distanced, direct conscious communication, the custodian links their own consciousness with that of this other being, Totemi. Totemi acts as an ontological duality and begins working on maintaining and developing the infrastructure.”
How have you found your course and time at Brighton?
“The Masters of Architecture course here at Brighton has not only been a joy, but been an opportunity to engage with wide range of tutors, researchers and even other courses and disciplines which has the affect of enriching your work. Most notably to me would be the new research program and modules, which have encouraged each of us to view our design work not purely as an architectural proposition but a way of questioning and expanding our own research interests through the medium of design.”
What are your plans after graduation?
“Being part of the population that is shielding due to Covid-19 has completely changed both my view and ability to do what I thought I would post masters, My hope now is to enrol onto an Architecture MRes course, where I’ll be able to expand on my research on embodiment and autoethnography. I also, in my own time, would like to learn several programs and expand on the narrative I developed in my design thesis my incorporating more complex 3D scenes and animation, and even begin expanding on my MArch 1 project on machine learning.”
See Jordan’s work in the End of Year Show.
Find out about studying MArch.
