VOLUME 02:

EXQUISITE CORPSE

VORKURS: exquisite corpse follows VORKURS: making as the second volume produced by the University of Florida Graduate School of Architecture. As the flagship edition, VORKURS: making probed how methodologies advanced by Bauhaus professors Josef and Anni Albers retain relevance to current explorations in architecture academia and praxis, within the University of Florida School of Architecture and beyond. Rooted in the foundations laid by the first volume, VORKURS: exquisite corpse conjures the surrealist chance-based parlor game played with words or images as a way to examine architecture through concepts of fragments, memory, authorship, process, and poetry.

In the earliest exquisite corpse games, participants blindly added the next word in a poem, prompted only by a part of speech (typically following the pattern ‘the adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun). The title emerged from an early game in which the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine resulted. A game of words was quickly translated into one of images, in which "artists build a figure (read: body) on an absurd assembly line. Typically a piece of paper is folded into sections and passed around; the challenge is that each artist must work on one particular segment without having seen the others.”1

VORKURS: exquisite corpse analyzes architecture’s contemporary issues through concepts derived from the game: fragment and palimpsest as design research tools and spatial generators; the collective and it’s relationship to teaching, thinking, and building; and finally, into the broken silence redefining culture, the body as metaphor, as an unfolding of a body of work, and the transitional idea of the female body itself in relation to our built world. Sets of images and words emerge in dialogue; authors speak across the folds.

We hope within these pages, you find new life in the corpse.

-Jamie Lindsey

Executive Editor

1 Karen Rosenburg, “Morphing Figures, Mismatched and Distorted,” The New York TImes, March 29, 2012.