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(22-23) Hybrids

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, paradoxes and contradictions that architecture is unquestionably responsive to. It marked the end of stability, absolutism and our old toolkits for creating architecture. (Elena Manferdini, The Magic of Asking’What if?’, Radical Architectural Pedagogy, AD 04 Emerging Talents Training Architects vol 91 2021)

 

Master Studio, Ghent, semester 3 academic year 2022-23
Tutors: Mira Sanders + Riet Eeckhout

 
Images: Mantas Povilaika, Céline Lecouturier 2021-2022

Understanding architecture as a commodity in a globalised consumerist society, we are confronted with the illusion of stability infiltrating the minds of people 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.

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 recourse wars carving a landscape of global conflict. https://vimeo.com/191817381 Hyper Normalisation, Adam Curtis, 2016, documentary.

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. In this process of understanding a particular reality of architecture, we value the state of flux, the dynamic and the movement towards actualisation and instantiation.

Aesthetics of interstice

Aesthetics is not a merrily way of giving form to objects, it is indeed a way of making sense of the world through the idea of our outward appearance.  We want to challenge 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 each understand is true.
In a world in which the overarching aim seems to be the maintenance of stability and acceptability (in politics but also as an aesthetic paradigm in the world of design and architecture) we want to interrupt this growing hunger for aesthetic clarity and designed neutrality.
We will work through various layered modes of representation, communication and collaboration and venture into this current volatile context, riddled with complexity and contradiction to fearlessly explore the unstable terrain of multiplicity and ambiguity.

Ways of working
In the first part of the semester, we take the utmost freedom to dive into a context reading, articulating and reworking of the spatial aspect exploration of chosen films, documentaries, images and verbal essays to demarcate interest, and to collide and edit the material of interest into a one-minute site.  This one-minute site holds the expression and impetus of the student’s spatial intend to be drawn out in part two of the semester.

The second part of the semester revolves around the figure-ground architecture based on the one-minute site.  This involves extensively drawing out and sectioning the one-minute site resulting in an architectural environment in the medium of choice.

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.  Included as well is a written reflection, contextualising the drawn project and the inherent idea production.  In this Project Book students will articulate the particular ‘gesture of architecture’ through drawing present in the project.

Drawing Architecture Studio
This Master studio is part of AOB Drawing Architecture (Arnaud Hendrickx, Riet Eeckhout and Mira Sanders) interested in the agency of drawing in the production of space and thoughts, affiliated with the research group Radical Materiality, Material Narratives, The Drawing and the Space.

Beyond the usual representational imperatives of architecture drawing, at the Drawing Architecture Studio we consider, discuss and use the architectural drawing as a site of emergence and imagination. Methodically, the Drawing Architecture studio strongly engages with the intertwined process of digital and analogue drawing, reading, making and building in the widest sense; with materials, media and techniques relevant to the investigation: knowing through the making.

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 and the manner in which we make these worlds present. Drawing on relational properties brings one closer to an understanding of the haptic space.

We use the situational as an example of a relational environment. Situational events, spatial encounters, the coming together of circumstances. Situational events take in space as they unfold over time.

Content of form
In this studio we strongly confide in and work with visual information, film and photography to extract knowledge and to explore an emphasis on the content of form while reading and using images and understanding visual information.

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. Karel schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, p223.)

This studio forms part of the Drawing Architecture Master studio and can be taken in combination with Master Thesis studio Drawing Architecture, Aesthetics beyond representational imperatives

Setareh Roozbahani ‘The Spheres of Influence. Experimental investigation through the edges of the hybrid spheres.’

The Spheres of Influence. Experimental investigation through the edges of the hybrid spheres. An investigation through the recent videos of the revolution in Iran in 2022 A continuous moment was taken from the level above the street territory, looking through the windows Zoom into the spatial character of these moments Where the domesticity of the […]

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Nicolas Claessens ‘Antinomy’

Antinomy is a narrative device that is used in literature and in philosophy. An antinomy is a self contradicting sentence or a paradox between two beliefs. These two beliefs are inherently correct, but when put together they contradict each other. This project will delve into the belief that antinomy can be a spatial feeling or […]

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Margot Manca ‘Blueprints of a Cityscape’

Throughout this booklet, you’ll discover my process of redefining an existing city. When I’m walking, different things in a cityscape catch my eye. It can be a detail of a doorknob, stairs that flow into a threshold, or how a façade can bump into a neighbouring roof. In my mind, these elements are taken out […]

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Lou Terryn ‘Simultaneity’

The starting point for my project was the text Crime scene: Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963, 12:30 p.m., an excerpt from the book In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics by Karl Schlögel. This text is about that the notion of a historic event is mainly determined by the images […]

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Aiken Parmar

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Wiktor Serafin ‘Transmorphing’

Is a process of overlaying images which morph together by establishing different connections between lines and points of the transformed images to create different spatial expressions. By adding more images to the composition and implementing subtle changes the space created can be interpreted differently. The process involved drawing inspiration from one-point perspective frames found in […]

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Yue Tian ‘In-Significance’

[Going down the corridor from reality to dream, getting more and more immersed] People’s life and work will have a numb mechanical part, just like the space that people experience in daily work, it is often a pale and monotonous corridor. How can architecture make users’ lives more colorful? My answer is more interaction, which […]

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Nuria Tondat ‘(De)Compos(e)(ing)(ition)’

The movie Nostalghia from director Tarkovsky is my starting point for this studio. The scenes exist out of gates, arches, columns, beams, and various architectural elements that take an important role throughout the whole movie. In my one- minute site the focus is on decomposing and collaging these different elements, living a life on their […]

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Luna Coesens ‘Scattering Space’

The course “Hybrids” was a spacial exploration of the visuals of the film “Vertigo” by Alfred Hitchcock. I followed my interest in the art of movie sets, the special qualities and ambience. I took inspiration from the matte paintings that were used as background behind fake walls to give the impression of depth. The element […]

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Niké Vanhoutte ‘Shadow of occlusions’

What first peaked my interest from the fragments that were shown in class were these 2 unrelated elements that played of the same idea. One was a sound that my mind interpreted and the other was an intriguing image. The sound intrigued me because my mind was an active participant in the experience, not knowing […]

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Joran De Roover ‘Moulded Realities’

On my quest for a fascination about what my starting point would be, I bumped into  the Warpset. Something between a warp and an offset. When recording footage at a certain velocity, if the rate of frames per second are too low compared to the speed of the camera, you get some kind of smudge […]

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Alejandro Cartin Garcia ‘The Singing Buildings. An architectural Etude.’

How can rhythm and melody can give structure and order to architecture? Or, how harmony can set the guidelines to design the mood of a space? The following document consist in the analysis and study of the relationship between architecture and music under the statement that music and architecture share common principles. How graphic scores […]

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Jinte Kockelbergh ‘Tracing Recursivity. A detailed dialogue between movement and space.’

The process of finding recursivity in space, was heavily influenced by three interests important to the development of the project. Firstly, photography and the methods created combining the camera and its movements. Secondly, the element of time and the different perspectives on the growth of a space. And finally, the element of movement in pulsing […]

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Ugne Neveckaite ‘Embodied Materiality’

The project “Embodied Materiality” investigates ambivalence of fabrics at play and its abilities to seek new tangible knowledge in architecture. Textile materiality is a sensing we interact with on a most personal level daily, yet its contingent fluid – liquid qualities still feel rather under disguise in the field of pre-defined and static. Stemming from […]

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Shahdad Badiehneshin ‘The Walk’

What is a hybrid? My interpretation of the word is that something which is two things at the same time, but neither of them. But how it is possible to design such a thing? This question took me back in my head, maybe way too deep. I started to remember my childhood memories of the […]

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Monika Dauksaite ‘What is known and what is unknown? Shadow of occlusion and potential of blind spots’

This project reveals a dual situation of front and back side or what we see and what we don’t see. It is a geometrical exercise where all the blind spots are drawn out and extracted from a situational site leaving a potential for imagination. Narrative is being adapted to this spatial situation. It represents my […]

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Marta Wisniewska ‘Space of Metamorphosis’

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Mantas Povilaika ‘Structural Surveillance’

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Mostafa Abuahmed ‘Morphing Contrast | Silent Spatial Dialogue’

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Liedewij Deruwe ‘Between Space’

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François Genicot ‘Spatial Generation through (Un)controlled Interferences: A Take on Metamorphosis’

We see the world through our eyes, peculiar to our species, Homo Sapiens. I didn’t want to start here pretending I know exactly how another intelligence translates the world, so I opted for a deconstruction – loosely based on how a fly perceives the world – of our own field of view. From focus to […]

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Zoë Proost ‘(De)Constructed Nature’

What started with a shelter from wild becomes a vast boundary between nature and the constructed self. From an imaginary world, this boundary is aff ected in this series. The “deconstructed nature” planet shows the hybrid of this. From the studio ingredients, the fi rst spaces are created using a one-minute site. In it we […]

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Ine Vangeenderhuysen ‘The Dictatorial Space’

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Hannah Gordts ‘Cycle of (de)Construction’

My fascination started with a single phrase in Latin from the author Marc Augés’s “Non-lieux”: “In statu nascendi” (“In the state of being born”). It describes the temporary form of an object when it has already started existing, but is not yet fully formed. It is about the moment thatwe have left but have not […]

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Francesca Paoli ‘What is left?’

The project was born from an immense passion for Italian auteur cinema and from the intention to tell something of my italian culture. Starting from a research of fragments, collecting minutes and images, it was interesting search for spaces characterized by a particular atmosphere, through architectures, objects, lights, schenography. Extracting parts of these scenes, such […]

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Estée Lievens ‘Emerging Space’

Everyday there is a game between light and darkness, two opposites but inseparable. Both are equally important for the perception and experience of space. These shadows, created by diverse light sources, give space another dimension. They create atmospheres, interests. When the light changes, the space changes with it, whether it’sartificial or natural light. The dim […]

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Enrico Pavone ‘Atomic Structure / Structural Landscape’

The hybrid has been evolving from a single grand structure into a landscape consisting of these elements. Its based on the radar tower at chernobyl and then rearranged and repeated similar to the idea of digital grotesque. By transformig a base element you can form a more complex grander object or structure with it. The […]

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Yasmine Vandeburie ‘Foldings & Moldings’

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Sophia Anthoni ‘Dissolve to free, dissolve to see’

My title is “Dissolve to see, Dissolve to free”. For my 1-minute video I asked myself a couple of questions, “How can space grow or shift by ‘dissolving’ an element or the existing space?” “How far can you search with the mirror for the spaciousness that was not there before?” With the word ‘dissolve’ I […]

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Dilek Arici ‘Folded Spaces’

The new landscape is a rearticulation of pieces of nature, pieces of man-made stuff and the friction that happens between these type of objects. And this brings different things on the surface, that not necessarily you can recognize the objects as a house or a train track. But it’s more the hybrid of how things […]

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