Footnotes from the Centre for Research Architecture brings together short contributions by students and staff of the MA 2017-18 programme. This publication provides a conceptual framework to compile a series of visual and textual footnotes by each of CRA's students. It enables each student to make visible a crucial fragment of the research process that fits neither within the dissertation's narrative or within the exhibition's format.
Placed either at the end of the page, a chapter or a book, footnotes affect the body of a text from without. From the margins, footnotes operate as powerful tools to unwrap and expand a key concept/context, to give space to shadowy information, to expose a methodological approach, to highlight a discovered source, to acknowledge an external contribution, to set the limits of a text, to redirect the reader. By inverting the figure-ground relation, we aim to give space to material that haunts our research projects from the outside.
The Centre for Research Architecture (CRA), Goldsmiths, University of London, engages spatial practice in relation to contemporary culture, politics, media, ecology, and justice. It brings together students from a wide variety of cultural and educational backgrounds, and from a diverse range of disciplines to work through questions of this kind. The Centre offers an alternative to traditional architectural education through a unique studio-based environment that investigates the urgent political conditions of our time through a combination of fieldwork, theoretical inquiry, and creative practices.
