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Porosity: The Architecture of Invagination

Porosity: The Architecture of Invagination

As a highly-respected Australian artist and architect, Richard Goodwin aims to change our view of cities as collections of individual buildings.

Porosity: The Architecture of Invaginationchanges our view of cities as collections of individual buildings. By prejudicing public space and finding previously undefined public spaces within them—“Chiastic Space”—it presents ideas for a radically transformed western city. By studying, defining and indexing these spaces, Goodwin has found “what a building desires” to do next in its determination to facilitate new technologies, new building-to-building connections and demands on its program.

Although the term "Porosity" is now widely used, Goodwin's pioneering use of the term since the 1990s remains unique. He uses it as a way of describing an urban experience, which turns architecture inside out and de-emphasises the obsession with facades. By licensing public space as needing to be equal to private in any city equation, and accepting the need of growing cities to have multiple ground planes, Goodwin's research and art/architecture practice challenges architecture to accept continual change as the only sustainable alternative. This complexity and flux will lead to an architecture driven by its interior and its connection to the city's public spaces as the title provokes.