Houses, Gardens and Landscapes: mental and material topographies
Academic year 2024-2025
ADO (1) Studio Anatomy 1: Topographies
Master of Architecture
Campus Sint-Lucas Gent
Engagement: Mediating Tactics and Craftsmanship
| Semester | Phase 1 – Spring semester (semester 2) |
| Startweek | Week 1 |
| Review week / sign in moment | Week 5, 8, 13, evaluation |
| Credits | 14 |
| Number of students | 12 |
| Language | English |
| Titular and teacher | Prof.dr. arch. Jo Van Den Berghe |
Image: Or was it under a Volcano in Iceland. Jo Van Den Berghe 2024.
Introduction
!! First read https://www.studio-anatomy.org/
While drawing ‘a house’ architects may often find themselves recurring to rooms and houses that dwell in their memories which act as a repository of imaginations that spark the drawing process. Oftentimes, these rooms and houses seem to be only unconsciously present. However, their agency as propellers of a design process in architecture can be deciphered and activated, by bringing them to a conscious level through drawing.
Hence, this research operates through and in the architectural drawing that becomes the LOCUS of investigation and reflection. The drawing, then, becomes a mnemonic device that lodges the acute moments of architectural creation and discovery.
However, in this studio there is more to it. Memories seem to be seriously affected by the human senses beyond the merely visual: the senses of touch, smell, taste and sound appear to be strong activators of sleeping memories, directly connecting with material properties of these remembered places and objects.
Hence the importance of directly including technical experimentations that may generate phosphorizing architectural materializations of remembered rooms and houses. Not wanting to avoid the hard core of architecture, i.e. the stubborn endeavour of its material making, and connecting with memories and imaginations that are the driving force behind the process, this studio, and mnemonic ‘drawing’ as mentioned above, revolve around the mastery of Technè that can become the generator of the poetic image (2) in architecture. Drawing these memories and imaginations will stretch as far as the full material elaboration of the memories and imaginations of the student. As such, the mastery of Technè, acquired through drawing material experiments and architectural details, begins to act as an instrument of self-empowerment for the (young) architect. Karl Friedrich Schinkel argues that “Our mind is not free if it is not the master of its imagination; the freedom of the mind is manifest in every victory over ‘self’, every resistance to external enticements, every elimination of an obstacle to this goal. Every moment of freedom is blessed” (Snodin 1991). Technè guides the architect to fully and meaningfully confront the question: how does a culture of making (building) contribute to making (building) a culture?
Drawing (verb)—mainly drawing by hand—constitutes the core of the method in this studio, and the drawing (noun) is the LOCUS of the research. The intense inhabitation of the drawing by the student through Critical Sequential Drawing (Van Den Berghe XXX) is key.
Design brief: House Garden Landscape
The student will identify and draw eidetic moments in their personal memories of (1) a room (a house), (2) a garden, (3) a landscape, that all seem the haunt them, deeply affecting their mental space and spatial intelligence (van Schaik 2008, Bachelard XXXX) yet being constitutive for who they are as an architect. These architectural obsessions need to be discovered and brought to the surface, where they can be activated as propellers of a design process. Gradually, revisiting these place through mnemonic drawing will mutate into designing and drawing a new house in a garden in a landscape.
This threefold needs to be drawn as sketches and vertical sections on scale 1/10 and 1/1 (architectural (window) details), that anatomize the remembered-imagined house, garden and landscape and, more specifically, the transitions between the house and the garden, the garden and the landscape, and the house and the landscape (via the garden). These sections constitute and clarify the material and mental topographies the student is residing in and deeply craving for, as an architect.
Drawing—mainly by hand—these sections, and different variations on them, will be done in such a way that the drawing process permits the drawings to slide into one another, to overlap, to intertwine and to contaminate one another through ‘montage’: e.g. how does drawing a topographical section affect drawing the house and even its window details? What is the agency of the garden as ‘in-between’ the house and the landscape, how and to what extent the landscape ‘makes use of’ the garden to pepentrate the room in the house, and by doing so, how does the landscape ‘make’ the house, etc …
The drawing process is aiming for dimensional precision that must encompass both the technical and emotional spheres. It takes emotional precision by the architect to identify what needs to be expressed, like it takes technical precision by the architect to express these urging emotions and draw them as pricisely materialized architectures. Consequently, a further developing of technical precision may give rise to the discovery of new and unsuspected emotional precisions that otherwise might remain hidden, but which are becoming explicit through the meticulous exploration and comparison of the technical possibilities. Every cycle in this Critical Sequential Drawing (Van Den Berghe 2021) brings the drawing architect closer to identifying these emotions and their material expressions. Doing so, this studio turns into an instrument of self- empowerment for the young architect—the student.
Site:
The site is you: your memories and imaginations of a room, a house, and its garden, and the landscape (topography), that all seem to be ‘there’ in your personal past and present, your memories and imaginations. The house, the garden and the landscape need to be imbedded a topographical section that can be real, or imaginary, or remembered.
Mentally and intellectually, your main references in architecture, i.e. architects you admire, and fragments and details of their work, that keep buzzing in the back of your head, are part of your ‘site’, as an architect.
Evaluation format
The evaluation will assess the aspects as formulated above, i.e. the process and the final production. Criteria: see ects file and competention matrix.
The output will be presented on a weekly basis by the student, and in intermediary reviews in the presence of the whole group (reviews) and evaluated.
The reviews will be peer review, up-liner review by guest critics and academic review by the professor. There will be a final presentation with a public exhibition in the final week of the course for a jury of internal and external critics.
Objectices / Specific objectives and Learning Outcomes: see ECTS Sheets.
See https://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/opleidingen/n/CQ_51522855.htm#activetab=doelstellingen and https://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/opleidingen/e/CQ_51522858.htm#activetab=doelstellingen.
References:
- Bachelard, (1958). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, Boston.
- Snodin, (1991). Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a Universal Man. Yale University Press.
- Van Den Berghe, (2022). Antiphon for a Sabbatical: Revisiting the Mind of a Man formerly known as an Architect. Drawing reflections for the Works+Words Biennial, 2022 Royal Academy, Round Tower’s Library Hall, Copenhagen.
- Van Den Berghe, J. (2021). Critical Sequential Drawing: a drawing method to close the gap between the Poetic Image and its Material Stoa Journal 2, Dipartimento di Architettura Università. degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, pp. 168-179.
- van Schaik, (2008). Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester.
- Yates, (1966). The Art of Memory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- many more architectural references will be distributed at the introductory session and as the course
1 ADO: Academic Design Office. This is a pedagocical environment, developed at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, in which education, architectural practice and research in architecture cross fertilize and merge.
2 The concept of the poetic image has been brought forward by Vitruvius, who called it the architectural idea, and following from this, Alberto Pérez-Gómez has further elaborated on it, “… the poetic image, called after Vitruvius the architectural idea … the images that are proposed by the architect, issuing from his or her mind’s eye” (Pérez-Gómez 2006).