ABSTRACT
The chapter advocates surface as the new site of architecture’s criticality. It presents surface as a new epistemological and creative terrain, proposing four new typologies: urban surface; surface as an integrated element; surface as optically and physically transient; and as design method, in addition to representational surface. It contends that allowing the nascent history of surface to bear upon the debates on criticality is significant, because it reveals assumptions concerning the disciplinary limits of architecture. It argues that the acts of looking past, looking through, or not looking at surface at all constitutes it as a disciplinary blindspot, and hence the architectural unconscious. Due to the physical and conceptual in-betweenness of surface, and because it is neither completely repressed nor fully materialized, it is capable of sustaining a critical distance. The sighting of the architectural conscious is not just a critical turn; it is also a creative turn. This is explored in the author’s scholarly reflections on the experimental studio at University of New South Wales, where the students interrogated the limits of the plan; the ‘orthographic gaze’ that impedes the social possibilities of the spatial; and the potentialities of surface in generating alternative spatial organizations.
