Destructive Knowledge: Strategies for Learning to Un-Do

Abstract

Architects are moved by a genealogical inertia that drives them towards doing. Their tools are thought to be the means to imagine, to design, to construct, in the end, to do. The Latin do, serves as the root to a series of words that are related to the notion of accumulated knowledge, doctus, doctor, but also to docilis, to be docile. Gordon Matta-Clark, the well-known artist taught as architect essentially kept working with the tools of architecture, but instead of doing, most of his work is dedicated to undo. His strategies are not only about un-constructing buildings, however, I would argue, they were mostly a mode of search and exposition of his archival impressions of art and architecture. This text considers the conceptual consequence of this working process of the artist as a tool for interrogating the formative moment of art and architecture by developing tools to un-do, this is, to remove docility from disciplinary knowledge.

Keywords

• Knowledge
• Architecture
• Docility
• Matta-Clark
• Splitting