Making relationships: interpreting the dialogical field of an architectural project as a design object

Abstract

In This Is What We Do: A Muf Manual, the partners of the firm muf architecture/art wrote that ‘paradoxically, in order to make the thing the collaboration has to be about the making of the relationship rather than the object.’1 This article takes this assertion as its basis and examines the implications of treating the individual and collective relationships that structure an architectural project – which I will refer to as the project’s relational field – as a site that can be manipulated in order to affect both production and outcome. This is achieved through the transposition of concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on creative activity, art, literature, and language to design using a case study of muf’s Barking Town Square project in London (2004–10).