Mediocracy

Mediocracy is an exhibition of architectural research by Michael Chapman and Chris Tucker. The exhibition comprises over sixty works, including models, original drawings, renderings and photographic works. The works position architecture as a mode of enquiry, using architecture as a way of investigating social, economic and cultural paradigms. Architecture is positioned as a tool for articulating the structures of contemporary life and a methodological approach to attaining and disseminating knowledge. Where traditional architectural research has focused on the historical, theoretical and scientific study of architecture itself (primarily through the study of individual architect’s works), the works in this exhibition set out to use architecture as research, in both scientific and theoretical contexts.

The work in the exhibition is fuelled by academic life, and specifically the engagement with studio teaching and creative enquiry that has become central to the Masters of Architecture program in Newcastle, where both Chris and Michael teach. Through their teaching, Michael and Chris have established an approach to “ideas” in architecture as a process of enquiry, where design becomes a strategy for exploring ideas and progressing them to their logical conclusion in architectural form. The work in this exhibition begins to formalize this relationship by using the architecture as a deliberate mediation between the concerns of teaching, research and practice. The methodological and theoretical premises of the work are supported by formal research essays, which present and expand upon the hypothesis of this work within a scholarly context of peer-reviewed architectural research.

The works of Michael Chapman consist of original drawings, interrogating the spatial structure of industrialization and the systems of control and power that architecture frequently disguises. In this inverted model of architectural representation, layers of structure are unpeeled from the surface in order to reveal the internal organization and relationships that connect workers, materials and machines within architecture. Operating within the context of the anarchic visual practices of Dada and surrealism, the drawings function as a mode of excavation, distilling spatial and societal information by progressively removing layers of data and recoding existing information within an expanded context of representation. Architecture becomes a methodological approach through which aspects of Marxism, Taylorism and Rationalism can be understood as spatial and architectonic constructs, buried within the labyrinth of architectural banality .

The works of Chris Tucker, which comprise his PhD research into residual space, consist of photographic works which draw attention to the social and political landscape in which space operates and its relationship to broader currents of contemporary life. Investigating aspects of the street, ownership, use and agency, the works use architecture as a methodology to reveal the relationships between space and knowledge and the various interests that control and decipher this. The works use architectural techniques as a tool to understand and map the hidden relationships that govern space within the city and establish architectural research as a forum through which urban conditions can be both interrogated and dismantled.