Tropological Research in Envisioning Architectural Narratives

This paper arises from a pedagogical experience based on the development of a methodology for research in the field of construction of research problems in architecture. The experience was addressed to students in the fifth and final year of the architecture career at the National University of La Matanza, in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The main objective was an introduction to the broad and complex field of academic research as a pre-thesis exercise. The hypothesis that sustained the experience was to understand tropology as a tool for the figuration (Haraway, 1992; Braidotti, 2019) of epistemic and heuristic problems. The methodology used consisted in developing an apparatus that generates research problems from the recognition of a topos – a topic or epistemic commonplace belonging to the disciplinary field of the career – and its relationship with a tropos –a figuration–. On the one hand, the topos was chosen by each one of the students according to their socio-cultural problems and according to their specific living situations within the framework of architecture and urbanism. On the other hand, the tropos emerged from an exercise of figurative displacement that made it possible to account for the predicative rather than denominative potential of the tropos. From the semantic crossing between the topos and the tropos, the students constituted their own syntagm that also served as the future title and tagline of the research project. This syntagma had the characteristic of being a hybrid, a space of signification generated by the displacement of the topic towards the creation of the new place, of fictional character, which had to be narrated and described according to its own logic and which functioned as an inhabited threshold between the topic and the u-topic, a place that is installed beyond the topical, the tropical.