Paper short abstract:

How can the architect, the engineer or the surveyor understand and work within a world in movement if his practices keep fixing the world? Alternative practices of measurement, templates, practical geometry and patterns will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is part of an ongoing research that problematizes modern practices of urbanizing land that try to fix the flows of materials of ground, water and weather. Looking at the beach in South East Spain and the practices of its inhabitants (humans and non humans) and aided by the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, I've seen how, although the efforts made to fix them, flows of materials never stop. I've come across new understandings of infrastructure and our bodily relations to materials. Nevertheless it's still difficult to imagine how actual professionals, heirs of modern idea of design, can change their practical ways of working in correspondence with this world in movement. How can the architect, the engineer or the surveyor understand and work within this flow if his practices keep fixing the world? What is what makes it for us so difficult to work with the movement of the world and not against it?

I will try to contribute to these questions looking at some key practices of the art of "making things stick" (Barber 2007): measurement, templates, practical geometry and patterns with concrete ethnographic and historical examples and reflections from anthropologists and philosophers that show how it is possible to do it in alternative ways. But also, I will show how I'm trying to bring forth these reflections to alternative practices of measuring. Because as an architect, not unlikely Renaissance painters, merchants and sailors or medieval masons and peasants, or lace making apprentices, we also have "to learn to count out the stitches" (Mackovicky 2010).