Architecture and its discontinuities: crisis, whose crisis?

Understanding and architectural education in terms of its discontinuities opposes the perception of architecture as unified discourse with coherent disciplinary boundaries. Exposing a discontinuity in an apparently unified system will almost certainly result in an emergence of something different, however small. Foucault believed that by freeing statements of which a particular continuity is formed and apparently natural groupings are formed we would be able to describe other unities, however provisional. When perceived to be in crisis, architecture’s discontinuity manifests itself through numerous disturbances at the level of discourse, academia or practice. Crisis, if architecturally grounded, may become a tool for new object formations and spatial relationships, in which the project and the studio could be understood as spatially and temporally elastic concepts. This paper utilizes the idea of discontinuity as a place of experimentation in which innovation requiring research and practice results in an alternative approach to architecture at the edges and margins of disciplinary boundaries.