Andy Macdonald, founding director of Mac-Interactive Architects in Sydney, has long held the term synectics as central to his practice. 

I Love Todd Sampson is an Australian first; a multi-disciplinary theatre work integrating architecture, installation art, light, music, film and performance, with Macdonald acting as a facilitator to the creative teams.

Architecture & Design spoke to him about working on I Love Todd Sampson, artistic collaborations and synectics.

Can you tell A&D about the collaboration?

I Love Todd Sampson is an ambitious project – not only in terms of its scale (the theatre in which takes place is over 5,000 sqm of raw space) – but also in the extent of the collaborations involved. I imagine it would be foolish to suggest this is a world first. Architects designing the sets for theatre is nothing new.

However, 10 teams of architects (some of which include other disciplines such as designer-makers and artists) collaborating together with sound designers, musicians, artists and a film maker on this scale is most certainly not something I have come across elsewhere. 

That was not the raison d’etre – it was not about being first. The project began as a story about a vulnerable soul and grew from there. I Love Todd Sampson is a multi-disciplinary theatre work which presents as a conversation between architecture, sound, light and performance. Using site specific installations, artists across each discipline combine to create works that are discrete from one another and yet connected – they are unified through the performance and space.

Pier 2/3 photo: Dara Kretschmer

 

How did it come about?

The Living Room Theatre’s (LRT) creative director Michelle St Anne chose Pier 2/3 for its textures, its scale and its raw beauty. Empty, it is a haunting cavernous space and Laura’s story is a contemporary ghost story. The building not only becomes a metaphor for Laura’s state of mind, but also serves as triggers for new exploration from the artists/collaborators themselves.

The texture and quality (and clarity) of our memories are often very different, despite emanating from a single mind – a childhood memory could be warm and happy and would have a very different atmosphere/texture to a memory that re-invites trauma or distress.

In early discussions with Michelle there was a feeling that a single set-designer might fall into the trap of not capturing the contextual opportunities held within the building, and at worst cover it up. Would an architect respond better to the building, producing something a bit more raw? 

What has been your the design approach to it and why?

This idea of opening the design up to being created by more than one hand, could be further abstracted/extended through the idea of each of the designing teams not necessarily being aware of what the others are doing, whilst LRT would obviously know what is going on at a macro level and be able to steer things away from homogeneity.

Ultimately the aim is to draw the audience into Laura’s mind – the everyday, the domestic, the familiar – but all underpinned by a sense of disquiet. The audience, like Laura,  will find patterns in seemingly random configurations of language, image, sound and space creating a sense of communal listening and closer awareness of the individual in the larger environment. 

Many of the audience will undoubtedly know the building from other events there. For us it is the emptiness of the space that must be maintained for a sense of theatre. The journey of the performance moves from clutter (representing confusion in Laura’s mind) through to vast emptiness to communicate loss and vulnerability.

Do you think more collaborations like this will become more popular in 2013?

I do not believe collaboration is new, but agree entirely that collaboration is becoming more popular generally, and yet there are voices in the creative community questioning the collaborative model. The proposition exists out there that by collaborating with other design disciplines, architects are diluting their potency as political animals and agents for change. 

Whether this has merit or not it is an interesting point for debate. It is contrary to the current favouring of collaborative mechanisms, but true collaboration involves challenging your pre-conceptions and listeningto  the conflict of ego.

Can you explain the term synectics, which you say is central to your practice? How did you learn about it?

In its most simple definition synectics is a problem solving technique. It involves bringing together seemingly unrelated elements, the use of analogy to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange with the purpose of achieving new creative responses.

I first came across the term in the late 80s/early 90s when I was involved with a variety of multi-disciplinary groups searching for new ways of ‘seeing and doing’. We would run workshops with architecture students in the UK, the formats of which would mutate daily, but typically might involve some sort of strenuous activity followed by reading, followed by an activity that involved physical touch, followed by restfulness; all the while (re)searching for new connections and paths.

The other part of synectics that peaked my interest was the idea that problem solving through collaboration of people from diverse (rather than similar) backgrounds could lead to new ways of seeing.

How do you apply it to projects?

Synectics in its truest sense is a fairly rigorous “process”, and I cannot say I apply it religiously to each and every project, but instead it has developed into more of a learned response for me. Thinking synectically reduces the tendency to lockdown on problem definition early in the process, but instead encourages randomness, absurdity, and analogy as tools for exploration of the task at hand. It works best in group situations and relies on a criticism-free environment (initially) to ensure freedom of thought.

Developed in the early 60s by William J. Gordon from existing research into creative individuals and the creative process, synectics imbues the creative process with certain psychological states, believing that if these can be induced then creative breakthroughs would increase their occurrence, creating a truly free creative stream of thought.

A project such as I Love Todd Sampson is the perfect opportunity to involve synectics on the level of multi-disciplinary action creating new artistic outcomes – I think this is hard to grasp in words and so I would recommend that anyone who is interested should come down to Pier 2/3 in the first week of March and have a look at I Love Todd Sampson.

 

More details on ‘I Love Todd Sampson’ can be found on The Living Room Theatre website .