FUTURING CULTURES OF INHABITATION: the wicked home.
MASTERSTUDIO ARCHITECTURE & INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE (MARG24 + BIAG65)
Academic year 2019-20, semester 2, Ghent
Promotors: Annelies De Smet, Jo Liekens, Nel Janssens
FUTURING CULTURES OF HABITATION aims to provide a learning environment in which we investigate how we, collectively and individually, construct both in form and in meaning, the most “basal”, the most primary concept (how we conceive of it) and the most basic act (how we make it real) of every architectural operation: (co-, in-)habitation.
Departing from everyone’s individual experience, we will execute a number of exercises from which we build a collective repertoire of prototypical concepts and acts of (co-, in-)habitation. This will enable us to give a renewed meaning to habitation, in a context where we move from an industrial to an ecological era.
This academic year the studio is situated within the Academic Design Office The Wicked Home and focusses on the quality of ‘wickedness’ in habitation. Wicked ‘probably comes from the Old English wicca “witch”’(Dictionary, n.d.). Therefore, we embrace magic, risky, sully and flirtatious attitudes, instructive amusements and errs with that what is contingent and unpredictable in your commitment to inhabiting.
PHASE I: Experiencing and designing the wickedness of your home.
Week 1 – 2: “What and who, is my home? And what does it do when I am not around?” is an individual exercise in carefully listening, looking, sensing to your home environment (whatever that may be) to detect its liveliness, its matter being active and responsive, and the co-inhabitants you had never encountered. Work from the immediate surroundings of your own immersed and experiencing body, and from this engage with the larger socio-spatial constellations. Scale 1/1 is an important one, not only in a metrical sense but beyond that, also and eminently as an affective and social scale. Use the media you deem appropriate (video, sound, drawing, creative writing…) during this two-week intense conversation with the non-human and lively creature that is your home.
Week 3:
½ day – Narrate your experience through film, sound, text, graphic novel, comic, performance or image…
½ day – workshop: cooking your own building materials (Glimpse)
Week 4 – 6: Jump at the most “basal” of architecture’s briefs: design your own house. You test your renewed sense of habitation in a concrete design for your own house– as the architectural expression of how to relate your body, and the other necessary bodies that participate in your well-being, to a lively environment. Scale is again an important issue and may vary from poetic interior-architectural artefacts, bodily prostheses, (super)furniture, room, building, landscape…
PHASE II: Moving from explorative designing to prototyping
Week 7 – 8:
1st day – exhibition and evaluation of individual design work produced in the previous weeks (What makes your house a wicked home?).
2nd day – day off, to digest
3th day – extract from all individual works aspects of wickedness you find interesting to further develop.
4th day – introduction to prototyping and move to the canal boats Captal and Amundsen. Shifting from working individually to working collectively, as an academic design office.
5th day, regular studio day week 8 – present your selection of wicked aspects identified in week 7 and a first idea of how to develop them further in relation to the specificity of (the site of) the boat. From hereon, we work collectively, as a design office and will start with a staff meeting to discuss and refine the design brief, make a work planning and assign the different tasks to the participating designers (you).
PHASE III: Collectively prototyping wicked homes
Week 9 – 12:
Designing prototypical elements and compose them into a wicked home, inspired by or implemented in the boat.
Week 13: Evaluation of the collective work.
Week 14: Collective reflection on the produced work during a one day conversation with invited guests. We will sit amidst the artefacts you produced and ask ourselves the questions ‘why does it matter and why should we care?’
For more background information, please, read the full booklet and presentation here
This studio is also related to the studio SHIPYARD (marg14).