| Tutors | Andreas Nonneman, Riet Eeckhout |
| Campus | Ghent |
| Language | EN |
| Engagement | Mediating Tactics |
| Semester | 1 |
Vertical Studio
GROUND MOVEMENTS is a vertical studio collaboration between a semester-1 and semester-3 studio, led by Andreas Nonneman and Dr. Prof. Riet Eeckhout. More information on this vertical studio environment at the bottom of this assignment.
For centuries, humans have straddled the land with larger-than-life ambitions striving for quality and efficiency of enriched existence changing our natural ground formation in the process.
Whether they are the construction of large-scale infrastructural works or industrial plants and installations extracting or processing natural resources, we increasingly engrain the anthropocene landscape with permanent marks of human activity.
The resulting cultural products permanently change and impact the landscape in a manner which, over time, challenges our cultural understanding of the natural landscape and the spatial and relational conditions it is affected by, and entangled with.
Drawing[1] from spatial and relational conditions in the landscape of Charleroi
Our design laboratory focuses on the contrasting landscape of the city of Charleroi, its surroundings, its determining circumstances and contingencies. Charleroi is one of our countries’ youngest cities, simultaneously it’s one of our biggest. This speed, together with the historical and geological circumstances by which it has evolved produced a city with an extremely complex, layered, intertwined and contradictory—spatial—character.
Historically, ecologically, materially and socially, this city has developed out of sizeable actions, movements of ground – impactful spatial gestures, resolute and unforgiving, but at the same time subtle and discrete in their peripheral presences and lasting repercussions.
In Charleroi ground movements can be tracked down to the origination of the city, built out of rigorous star-shaped fortifications of the 17th century. The city really expanded rapidly in the 19th century, during the industrial revolution when coal saw a tremendous rise in economic importance in the Sambre and Marne valleys. The construction of connecting canals for industrial transport, the installation of canal locks and the sophisticated inclined plane of Ronquiere. Expansive mining industry and steel processing infrastructure still assert a strong power over the city, including the scattered remains of an era gone by. Uncannily uniform housing facilitating the numerous local and immigrant workers brought in as a vital lifeline for its unstoppable growth mid twentieth century. An elevated ring-road on top of all existing morphology, an elevated railroad awaiting use, third landscape[2] ecosystems and terrils[3] still radiating heat as phantoms of what once was a city with endless opportunities.
Beyond both problematizing or romanticizing perspectives of lost economic potential and the beauty of tristesse, lies the contingent potential of what can arise from this post-industrial landscape’s spatial and relational conditions.
Spatial Relational Conditions
The vertical studio (sem-1 and sem-3) Ground Movements endeavers to observe uncanny dynamic occurrence of the anthropocene landscape, born from Charleroi’s industrial heritage. Beyond the romantic gaze of this post-industrial legacy and the dramatic large-scale display of mechanical industry that dominates the city, we lay bare the relational conditions that make up this hybrid display of human occupation, and the new natural ecology that thrives on this intensely intertwined human history.
How do we grasp the uncanny and irreconcilable differences between the heroic endeavours of human progress in large scale ground movements, and the poverty-stricken collateral of what that dream has left behind over time. The wind whispers catastrophe, as this landscape bears witness to the melancholy and gloom of this post-industrial landscape in this once rural environment. But the regenerative cycles of growth upscaled the vigorous return of nature on the substrate of black shale, transforming this fertile wasteland in an interstitial wildness.
The Alter-Archaeological Laboratory
Observing the landscape through material production.
Within classical archaeology, one could argue that the act of uncovering, the act of documenting and understanding the preserved, paradoxically, constitutes the production of a new situation.
The archaeologist’s task is, due to material and cultivated indeterminacy, to negotiate a conclusive material narrative to document what was, what is, and to project what could have been.
Architects seem to occupy a very similar position. They survey what is present, and imagine and speculate on possible futures. Unlike in archaeology, in architecture we serve the purpose of spatial production. In architecture, it is possible to choose which discoveries to reveal, to contradict them, or to preserve them just as is done in classical archaeology.
Projective Archaeology
Archaeology becomes an unpredictable form of projective technology” Geoff Manaugh writes about the speculative drawings of Lebbeus Woods[4]. Archaeology, the study of human past through material remains, is used here as a projective technology; “fiction becomes reflection”[5]. leaning on and drawing from observed occurrences and dynamics in the landscape, we speculate through recording, drawing, modelling, tracing, on the spatial content our reflections give rise to.
In this studio, architectural imagination unconstrained by financial, programmatic and construction-technical aspects, we radically extract, reconstruct and speculate on what the spatial-relational conditions we find can give rise to.
By appropriating alter-archaeological methodologies, the processes and techniques shift from the statute of documentation and preservation, to that of a productive mechanism or instrument. An alternative archaeology, an active archaeology, a projective archaeology.
Radical Extractions and Poetic Gatherings
While the collection of information through drawing, modelling, assemblage, ect.., can be governed by scientific rules and guidelines, the term poetic gathering highlights the potential of different categorising factors addressing unfamiliar consistencies of spatial relations.
When one encounters uncanny situations in the landscape, perhaps characterised by a fleeing temporal nature, perhaps incompleteness or intangible spatial relations that slip under traditional modes and techniques of surveying or mapping, one needs to devise custom ways of mapping to grasp these underlaying and indeterminate characteristics.
Throughout this experimental process of collecting, drawing, making, projecting and modelling, we will detect spatial fragilities, rigidities, dynamics, consistencies, characterised by thresholds and inherent contradictions. This material production will gain depth and volume through a parallel act of staging, making the work accessible though installation, presentation, projection, or any other possible form of transmission into the studio environment.
Design Intent
The exploration we will undertake throughout this first semester takes on the form of a spatial investigation, and makes use of the complete scope of hands-on, known/custom architectural and extra-architectural methods of making.
Vertical Organisation
The Vertical studio Environment brings together students from different academic years, allowing students to share experience, thinking and knowledge across the two master years. This peer-to-peer learning not only accelerates the acquisition of design skills and knowledge, but students from different year levels also bring varied experiences and perspectives, enriching the design process and leading to enriched individual propositions.
First and second year master students of the Ground Movements studio will join efforts to unravel and extract the observed dichotomies of a post-industrial landscape and extrapolate these observations in individual projects and spatial propositions.
While the first 6 weeks will be a fully integrated studio with both semesters to encourage peer learning transgressing semestrial boundaries, the last 6 weeks both studio’s distinguish their individual outcomes. Tutorials will take place in the same room and reviews/juries will be shared and take place simultaneously.
In the first 6 weeks you will devise individual ways to materialise your observations honing into your spatial interests in this landscape. We take the utmost freedom to dive into a context reading, selecting, articulating and reworking a spatial-aspect exploration. We will scavenge between the silent industrial chimneys, the abandoned industrial estates, the black coal dunes, the changed natural habitats of the land, the curtailed construction of canals, the uncanny residential occupation. We observe and draw the relationships and resistances these scaled infrastructures engage with to understand the material conditions that characterise this dynamic landscape.
EXPLORING, last 6 weeks
Within the Alter-Archaeological laboratory we develop our gatherings and extractions into a series of Alter-Archaeologies, these experiments constitute an investigative practice where multiplicities can arise. Throughout the last six weeks we do not necessarily aim at only one clearly outlined final project but conduct multiple simultaneous spatial experiments or explorations contributing to the building of a project if not a personal practice.
The laboratory provides a framework for ways in which an archaeology, and its spaces, tools, methods, systems of classification, archives and notations can become instrumental for the extraction, [re-]consideration an multiplication of [im]material presences, helping us understand past and present spatialities, and their potentials. These understandings will then be brought together by way of staging.
Drawing Architecture
Drawing Architecture refers to an action in the present progressive, architectural research through drawing, driving the unravelling process of finding. Beyond the usual representational imperatives of architectural drawing, in this studio we consider, discuss, and use the architectural drawing as a site of emergence and imagination.
The term ‘Drawing Architecture’ not only delineates how and where architecture is conceived, explored, and assessed, moreover, the term underscores how a drawing can embody architectural characteristics and, can even manifest itself as architecture.
Drawing Architecture Studio adopts a broad view towards architectural design and drawing, embracing diverse forms of spatial practice to explore and materialize architectural concepts. In our studio, the architectural project unfolds through instrumental use of multimedia, including drawings, films, writing and models. These serve not only as creative outputs, but also as sites where architectural space and related subject-matter can emerge and evolve over time. We methodically enable the agency and capacity of multi-media in the production of space and thoughts.
This studio forms part of the research group at KU Leuven Material Narratives – Radical Materiality
https://materialnarratives.eu/
This studio builds further on the following studio’s from previous years:
Poetic Instants and Archaeologies
Studio Drawing Architecture: Hybrids, Aesthetics of Interstice 23-24
Studio Drawing Architecture: Aesthetics beyond representational imperatives 23-24
Image References
Charleroi – Claire Chevrier – Musée de la photographie – 2013
L.A.P-03 (BRICHART, Zone de Bonne Espérance)
L.E.T-03 (BRICHART, Zone de Bonne Espérance)
LT.P 01 (BRICHART Zone de Bonne Espérance)
L.A.P-04 (SANDREA)
©claire chevrier ADAGP
Further reading
The View From the Road – Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and John R. Myer – MIT Press – 1965
Taking Measure Across the American Landscape – James Corner and Alex S. MacLean – Yale University Press – 1996
Manifesto of the Third Landscape – Gilles Clément – Trans Europe Halles – 2004
An Atlas of Fiducial Architecture – Liam Young – After Us – 2015
How Tall is the internet? – Lai Yi Ohlsen – E-flux Architecture – 2024
[1] ‘drawing’ in this studio, can be simultaneously understood as the act of ‘drawing from’, ‘to draw from’ – to take, transfer or obtain something from a particular source. And the productional act of ‘drawing‘ or ‘drawing out’- a method of giving visual form to figure, concept or thought using various techniques.
[2] ‘The third landscape’ Is a term used by landscape architect Gilles Clément to describe an intermediate landscape-space that supports a biodiversity not found elsewhere, and is a product of neglect by humans, it encompasses places, such as road shoulders, riverbanks, moors, industrial wastelands, train tracks and so on.
[3] Terril is the french word for a man made hill consisting of waste material removed during mining: the black dunes, hills of coal waste, now overgrown with vibrant ecologies.
[4] https://bldgblog.com/2007/10/without-walls-an-interview-with-lebbeus-woods/
[5] https://bldgblog.com/2007/10/without-walls-an-interview-with-lebbeus-woods/