Etudes and Variations : Waiting Rooms for a Practice to Come.
Jo Van Den Berghe – Master thesis studio
Max 9 studenten
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
Taal: NL
De jury gaat echter door in het Engels, om internationale juryleden uit te nodigen, studenten in contact te brengen met een internationaal netwerk en hen op deze manier meer kansen te bieden. Om deze redenen is deze studiobeschrijving opgemaakt in het Engels, zodat de ‘architectural discourse’ van meet af aan wordt ingeoefend.
Studio brief and program:
‘A House with a Courtyard, an atelier for an architect and an atelier for a fashion designer’.
The house and its ateliers should become the fourth façade of the existing village square of Sint-Goriks-Oudenhove. Hereby, 3 factors are utterly important.
Firstly, the landscape and its topography are the onset of the project, that should be imbedded in and ‘grow out of the topography. The topography is the compelling origin of the village, and the character of the village square strongly relates to the landscape. As such, this project starts from, and is going back to the scale of the landscape.
Secondly, the village square and its architectural bodies, typologies, spaces and materialities provides the student with major input. How can your architecture further define and strengthen these valuable and fragile contexts, and by doing so, become part of them.
Thirdly, further developing your mastery of Technè and the full development of the architectural (window) detail, up to scale 1/1, are key in this master thesis studio. This is seen as the indispensable condition for materializing (your) emotions hence for generating poetics in architecture. The student will be closely and intensively coached in these matters.
The house should be a home for 2 generations. The two ateliers should function separately, having their own accesses, pantries and bathrooms. Each atelier should be suited for the crafts(wo)man and 2 collaborators, who should have a dwelling as they may be interns coming from abroad, either in the architure studio or in the fashion studio. The courtyard should be a liminal space between the house and the two ateliers and eventually, but not necessarily, between the village square and the house, at the same time providing access to the house and being separable from the village square for private outdoor use if desirable for the inhabitants of the house.
Designing and drawing this project should range from the scale of the landscape—the architectural whole—as far as the scale of the architectural detail. For doing so, the architectural fragment occupies a strategic position as ‘middle ground’ between the architectural whole and the architectural detail. This facilitates a swift transition into the architectural detail and the architectural whole during the drawing process, permitting the drawing architect, who decides to dwell in the fragment, to absorb and merge energy and information from the two other scales of creation. Ultimately, the architect can understand this smart oscillating on the whole-fragment-detail axis, hence integrate the anatomies of the topography with the anatomies of the architectural detail. Investigating these anatomies will require the intense drawing of (vertical) sections to embark on the drawing process.
The drawing student needs to investigate how topographies and architectural details can co-exist through the elaborate creation of the architectural fragment. The drawing student needs to test-by-drawing how a basic Etude of an architectural fragment can be slightly altered through drawing Variations on the initial Etude of a fragment, and how and to what extent these Variations can exist next to one another, for the drawing architect and his ‘audience’ to be savoured—enjoyed—together and to the full extent, without having to exclude the quality of one Variation for the sake of the mandatory choice for another Variation. Having to make a final choice between Variations is not the point here. Rather, drawing and discussing the co-presence of Variations, and how this contributes to a more complete ‘delight’ in the experience of architecture while dwelling in the drawing process, is at stake in this master thesis studio.
Gradually, drawings of these fragments will have to be composed—literally in a montage—to form an emerging architectural whole, including the acceptation that some spots in the project may remain rather underdeveloped for the sake of more deeply and completely developing other fragments and (window) details, roof overhangs, brick bonds, carpentry, … , according to the personal fascinations of the student.
Finally, it is to be understood here how and to what extent drawing architectural fragments, emerging from this oscillating process, can constitute a personal repository for the student, a growing repertoire as the foundation for an emerging architectural practice. This new practice may be calling the young architect, hence what can the young architect draw in response to this calling? By doing so, these Etudes and their Variations become ‘Waiting Rooms for a Practice to come’.
Timing:
The fall semester:
will be dedicated to investigations of architectural references by drawing and scale modeling, and to questioning the agency of the architectural fragment in these architectural references, and in a design process. The student will produce a refined and detailed scale model on scale 1/50 of an architectural reference, accompagnied by drawing investigations of fragments and details as an onset for a personal architectural repertoire for the student.
The references will be selected by the promotor of the master thesis studio and presented and discussed with the students upon the first studio session.
We will do a site visit with the whole group.
The spring semester:
will bank on the investigations of the fall semester.
The program (see above) offers grips to the student to imagine situations, out of which a series of rooms and corners as architectural fragments will be developed, that constitute your series of Etudes and Variations (see above).
These fragments need to be fully elaborated, and as a series they form a personal repository, the onset of a personal repertoire, a prediction of your own critical reflective architectural practice. These rooms and corners both ‘project’ your future imaginations ànd strongly draw from your personal memories of spaces, haunting architectural bodies and eidetic architectural references that populate your past and present.
Method:
Drawing, mostly by hand, constitutes the core of the method of this master thesis studio (drawing, here, also includes scale modeling). More specifically, the drawing processes start from drawing vertical sections (including the topographies these sections belong to), into which central perspectives will gradually show emerging corners, rooms, and spaces. From these sections and their integrated central perspectives, fragments of floorplans are derived.
By drawing so, an Etude emerges from the process, existing of vertical sections, integrated central perspectives, and derived plans.
Consequently, this Etude is being critically questioned and re-drawn as Variations on the Etude, enabling all these Variations, and their originating Etude, to co-exist for reflection, evaluation, appreciation, and debate. The Variations originate from the Etude by critically evaluating the Etude through re-drawing the latter into new versions—Variations—through Critical Sequential Drawing (CSD)(Van Den Berghe 2021).
Motherhouse Zero b 1
Camera Obscura materiaalstudies gevel
Motherhouse Etude and Variations
Motherhouse Zero b 2
Topografie 1 Motherhouse b
Output:
1 – fall semester: detailed scale model of an architectural reference (scale 1/50) and drawings, sketches, … (see above under ‘timing’).
2 – spring semester:
- topographical sections, sections with inscribed central perspectives scale 1/20, (fragments of) plans derived from these sections, the investigation of full scale architectural (window) details scale 1/1, a plan on scale 1/50, drawings on scale 1/10 that permit to mediate between the scale 1/50, 1/20 and 1/1, and all the drawings needed to do the investigations and presentations. Also, a detailed scale model of the house and its surroundings on scale 1/100 (or 1/50) is requested. A very refined scale model of the site (village center and adjacent landscape) is already available and ready to consult in the studio.
- an academic architectural discourse in a written document (max. 10 pages) as a record of the drawing process and the contextualization of the Etudes and Variations in the landscape of architectural references the student will adopt. The student will explain how, and to what extent, the developed repository of Etudes and Variations is expected to act as a repository and propeller for an emerging critical reflective practice.
- finally, choreographing the jury moment through a meticulous set-up of the exhibition, as a group work with your teammates in the studio.
Evaluation:
The evaluation will be done on three scales.
- the student will be evaluated and calibrated on a weekly basis, at the occasion of the weekly studio day that will be spent on this master thesis project.
- three milestone evaluations will be organized during this master thesis project: one at the end of the fall semester, one in the last session before Easter holiday, and one approximately two weeks before the final jury moment.
- evidently, the final evaluation will be done through/in a jury-exhibition setting, where a selected group of (international) jury members will be invited to look at the work, and to discuss the process and the output with the student.
References:
From architecture and art:
- Andrew Wyeth: Public sale (1943)(https://www.wikiart.org/en/andrew-wyeth/public-sale), Brown swiss (1957)( https://www.wikiart.org/en/andrew-wyeth/brown-swiss).
- Pienza: City square ( https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-plan-of-the-central-square-of-Pienza-The-plan-shows-four-important-buildings-such-as_fig2_359401333)
- Tivoli: Villa d’Este and Villa Gregoriana : the landscape, the gardens, the villas.
- Alvaro Siza: Boa Nova (1963)(https://divisare.com/projects/265753-alvaro-siza-vieira-joao-morgado-renovation-of-boa-nova-tea-house).
- Knut Knutsen: Summerhouse (1946-49)(https://ofhouses.com/post/185489088746/681-knut-knutsen-summerhouse-m%C3%B8rkholmen).
- Peter and Alison Smithson: Hexenhaus (1986-2002)(https://ofhouses.com/post/174232086613/554-alison-peter-smithson-hexenhaus-witch).
- Terunobu Fujimori: Lamune Onsen (2044-05)(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Lamune_Onsen.jpg).
- KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture / Studio Anatomy: studio-anatomy.org, https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/motherhouse/
- KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture / The Architectural Detail: http://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/architectural-detail/
From literature:
- Angelidou, I. (2022). The Three States of the Architectural Fragment as a Collective Archive of Concepts: Tracing an Alternative Genealogy of Aldo Rossi’s Analogous Cities. The University of Chicago Press (https://doi.org/10.1086/721988 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/721988)
- Battestin, F. (2021). Piranesi e i frammenti della Forma Urbis severiana (https://journals.openedition.org/mefra/11526?lang=en)
- Miglietta, E. and Postiglione, G. (2021). Sigurd Lewerentz. The Paradox of Construction, in Lewerentz Fragments, edited by Jonathan Foote, Hansjörg Göritz, Matthew Hall and Nathan Mat-teson, 188-201. New York: Actar Publishers.
- Van Den Berghe, J. (2021). Critical Sequential Drawing: a drawing method to close the gap between the Poetic Image and its Material Presence. Stoà, pp. 168-179.
- Tom Emerson (2019). Aberturas/Openings, Conversations with the Alvaro Siza archive. ETH Zürich/Fundaçao Serralves (https://www.naoslibros.es/libros/alvaro-siza-tom-emerson-oberturas-openings/978-972-739-367-1/).