The Strangeharvest Method

Objects are evidence. Everyday objects and places reveal - in material, form, arrangement and the feelings and sensations they produce - hidden infrastructures of culture, economics, power, value. In other words ‘architecture’ in its fullest, most indescribable sense.

Strange Harvest treats the contemporary world not as a set of disciplines, but as a single, continuous system of value production staged through objects, space, images and environments encountered through the everyday.

It is concerned with how value is produced and performed, how reality is staged, and how the contemporary condition is mediated through images, objects and environment.

“Ideas as Things / Things as Ideas”. ‘Things’ are understood as condensations of larger systems in which vast and often invisible structures become momentarily legible. 

Strange Harvest most often works though direct observations about the objects and environments of contemporary life. Small and often overlooked/non disciplinary artefacts are treated as fragments whose edges act as clues to the hidden systems that organise modern culture. A portrait of the immediate present through which the structure of contemporary life becomes faintly visible.

Strange Harvest argues that, like faint stars that are only visible if you look away from them, for the oblique view as a way to see the world. A way of making visible the systems, meanings and significance that  surfaces, symbols and everyday encounters conceal.

Why a harvest? And why a strange one?

A harvest is an act that recognises value in what already exists. An action that involves recognising ‘ripeness’, and in doing so, also recognising the enabling mechanisms: seasonal / temporal, growth and accumulation, geology and place, weather and climate, labour and systems of organisation and extraction as well as storage, processing and distribution.sit inside systems of circulation and value.

In this context ‘harvest’ suggests things that have matured culturally, ideas that have accumulated meaning over time within wider ecosystems, framing culture - design specifically - as something that is cultivated rather than simply appearing. An argument about architecture and design that declares it as always enmeshed - or a product of - wider conditions.

‘Strange’ is a mode of orientation. It suggests a sense of unfamiliarity. Sometimes this effect is achieved by considering the marginal, overlooked, or oddly specific. On the other hand, it is a mode of viewing familiar things in an unfamiliar way: The ordinary rendered uncanny.

‘Strange’ isn’t (just) about weird content. It’s a method of defamiliarisation. A way of producing a slight cognitive dislocation, a way of loosening what feels fixed. And is loosening these assumptions allows us to think about alternatives, other possible trajectories, other kinds of world that can be designed. 

Strangeharvest as a portmanteau, as a ‘Zusammengesetzte Wörter’,  is a way of approaching architecture and design as a cultural phenomenon. It casts the critic and the designer as part anthropologist and farmer. Observer on the one hand and producer on the other (or rather simultaneously). Combining knowing with not-knowing. Being inside and outside. 

At heart also are two feelings. One of curiosity (eg. What is this?). The other of joy or pleasure (fruits, sustenance, collective produce). Strangeharvest takes these naive attitudes seriously. As foundational to any real understanding of how the world is produced and how we then inhabit it.