| Tutor(s) | Riet Eeckhout |
| Campus |
Ghent |
| Language |
EN |
| Engagement | Mediating Tactics |
| Semester | 3 |
Studio Drawing Architecture
Beyond the usual representational imperatives of architecture drawing, in this master studio we consider, discuss, and use the architectonic drawing as a site of emergence and spatial imagination. Methodically, the studio strongly engages with the intertwined process of drawing, filming, collaging, editing, reading, and building, with materials, media, and custom techniques to come closer to, investigate and speculate on the architectonic content of the student’s subject matter.
This studio operates in a vertical studio environment with A POETIC INSTANT
AESTHETICS OF INFRATHIN-GRAPHIES (Mira Sanders, sem1, MT)
What is the role of architecture in such reading of the world?
Understanding architecture as a commodity in a globalised consumerist society, we are confronted with the illusion of stability infiltrating our minds in this mediated world. Throughout history, architecture played a crucial role in mediating social structures and propagating political ideas. The architecture of our contemporary western cities cannot be understood in separation from an imperialist canon in ways that Baroque cities cannot be understood separate from an 18th century military establishment.
To escape a simplified version of the world that we accept as normal, we will design the hybrid space by addressing the aesthetics of culminated complexity of the interstice. The hybrid is characterised by situational change and a layered complexity of elements brought together in the push and pull between content and expression, between form and matter, between thought and image.
Bringing into the world / outward appearance / materialization / instantiation
Aesthetics is a way of making sense of the world through the idea of our outward appearance. We want to break singular vocabularies and simplified aesthetics which maintain the illusion of order and stability in a world where there is in fact none. We don’t aim for singularity nor for complexity;
we want to lay bare that which we know is true.
While architecture has never been an individual journey, the global pandemic has marked the end of our romance with hyper-individualism: an 18th-century idea of design genius whose superhuman creative abilities could draw and bring to existence a singular manifestation of architecture for the masses to admire. It marked the end of a capital-A architectural history, the orchestrated lineage of which promoted a singular narrative of the discipline, tone-deaf to the ambiguity, instability, paradoxes and contradictions that architecture is unquestionably responsive to. It marked the end of stability, absolutism and our old toolkits for creating architecture.
Can architecture engage with a more complex world beyond the promoted singular narrative of the discipline. (Elena Manferdini, The Magic of Asking’What if?’, Radical Architectural Pedagogy, AD 04 Emerging Talents Training Architects vol 91 2021)
Ways of working and expected output:
Relational thinking
The studio philosophy of Drawing Architecture is underpinned by an understanding of space as a relational environment, away from an object directed understanding of space-making and towards a perception of space as the relationship between elements: the architectural event. Central here is the understanding of the experiential immersive character of space, the awareness of the point of view from which we view and experience the world and the manner in which we make these worlds present.
This studio employs design methodologies with analogue drawing and collages, model making, digital modelling and film making to observe and respond to spatial situations in the development of an architectonic proposition.
Project Book
The intense process of the making of things, guiding the individual student step by step in de complexity and internal logic of spatial design and architectural thinking, is brought together in the project book, inclusive of a written reflection, contextualising the
drawn project and the inherent idea production.
References/Further reading:
Reading the mediated world around us > reading, seeing and sensing its complexity
We can read the world around us through various forms of ‘hyper normalisations’; as culminating forces driving cultures into mass uncertainty, mediated spectacle and simulation; from Donald Trump to Brexit, to resourse wars carving a landscape of global conflict.
Film/documentary
Documentary, Hyper Normalisation, Adam Curtis, 2016,. https://vimeo.com/191817381
Film, Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog (1982) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhhrfsXWYzY
The conquest of the useless, Werner Herzog
Documentary, Burden of Dreams, Les Blank, https://archive.org/details/burden.of.-dreams.-1982.720p.-web-dl.-aac-2.0.h.-264-fiend
The Drowned Worlds, Michael Wang (2018) https://michaelwang.info/The-Drowned-World
Tourisme International (fragment), Marie Voignier https://vimeo.com/95722646
– Current.Cam – Eli Joteva, Provides Ng, Alexey Yansitov, Artem Konevskikh (2019),http://current.cam/film //
Touch, Rise & Fall, Aernout Mik https://ubu.com/film/mik_touch.html
Of Earth and Sky Of Earth and Sky, Alexander Geysman, Olesia Kovalenko, Anna-Luise Lorenz and George Papamatheakis, website https://earth-and-sky.ru/
Forensic Architecture Cloud Studies https://critical-zones.zkm.de/#!/detail:cloud-studies
Harun Farocki, Videograms of a revolution (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGdn_eABGyA,
Capital, Sarah Morris (2000) https://ubu.com/film/morris_s_capital.html
Peggy Ahwesh, Kansas Atlas (2019)
Stalker, Nostalghia, Andreï Tarkovsky (1979) (1983)
Emilja Skarnulyte, Pleasure Prospects (2019) https://vimeo.com/420934150
Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock (1958) https://archive.org/details/vertigo-1958
Texts
The Stack (introduction), Benjamin Bratton
The Planetary Garden, Gilles Clément
Crime Scene: Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963, 12:30 pm, Karl Schlögel
In Defence of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl
Places to Non-Places, Marc Augé
Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant, Gaston Bachelard
Phenomenal Transparencies, Colin Rowe
On Media And Democratic Politics: Videograms Of A Revolution, Benjamin Young
Welcome to the Desert of the Real (The Missing Ink), Slavoj Zizek
In Free Fall, Hito Steyerl
Surface, matters of aesthetics, materiality and media, Giuliana Bruno
Hot Places, Cold Places, Karl Schlögel
The Wrong House, Steven Jacobs
If only we had trusted our eyes, if we had just looked at the images instead of turning our back on them, remarking that they were mere fetishes, fetishizations, surfaces, the semblance of something that lay concealed behind them: essence, the law, the principle that held the key to the proper understanding of appearances. When we see dead bodies, we are confronted with the death of actual people and not some principle of death; when we come face to face with torture victims, we must investigate their torturers and not evil as such; when we see ruins, we must study the blasts or ravages of time that laid them low, not some transhistorical law of impermanence. (The Work of the Eye. Trusting Our Eyes. “In Space We Read Time” Karel schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, p223.)