Academic year 2026-2027
Title:
Garden-House:
Drawing a House and a Garden and a Garden-House
Studio: ADO[1] Studio Anatomy 1:
Master of architecture – phase 1 – spring semester (semester 2) Campus Ghent
Engagement: Mediating Tactics and Craftsmanship
OPO 24 design studio
Head image: Hokusai, Mibu no Tadamine, Key-block print (ca. 1835-1836).
Introduction
!! First read https://www.studio-anatomy.org/
Landscape, garden and house can form a comforting and rewarding spatial continuum, and this central theme needs to be anatomised through drawing mainly vertical sections.
It seems to be so that people share a deep fascination for transitions between a (their) house and a (their) garden. It is a transition that, if imagined and executed with care and precision, can overcome separation hence affording a lived and re-liveable spatial and material continuum. ‘A here’ and ‘a there’ (Van Den Berghe 2019, De Brabander, Lagrange and Van Den Berghe 2022) seem to exchange their ontological longing for one another, sparked in that electrified erotic space between them (Pérez-Gómez 2006) that is loaded with mutual connections and expectations of desire.
In order to facilitate the triggering of the student’s imaginations, the whole semester will strongly bank on the investigations of case studies that have been pre-selected.
Design brief: the semester will be structured in 2 stages.
Stage 1: Case Studies (4 weeks, group work)
The students investigate pre-selected cases revolving around the connections between ‘a house’ and ‘a garden’ through which the following research will be done:
(1) Researching the case studies: for data about the research case (drawings, documentation, histories, …)
(2) Drawing: the case studies sections and plans scale 1/10 and 1/1
(3) Scale modeling the case studies (very detailed!): of the house and the garden scale 1/50 in wood.
The following cases will be investigated in groups of 3 students (group work):
(1) Ryōan-ji Temple, Kyoto, Japan (11-th Century, 1450, 1618, 1680).
(2) Van Buuren Museum and Gardens, Ukkel, Belgium (architect Léon Govaerts and Alexis Van Vaerenbergh, landscape designers Jules Buyssens 1924 and René Pechère 1968-70).
(3) Garten Haus (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), Weimar, Germany (1709).
(4) Hanna-Honeycomb House, Stanford, US (architect F.L. Wright 1937).
Stage 2: Drawing a House and a Garden and a Garden-House (8 weeks, individual work)
The drawing process of Stage 2 banks further on the investigations and drawings of Stage 1, with the specific request to draw an ‘amplified’ house-garden connection. For the sake of the studio theme and the process, ‘drawing a house’ does not necessarily mean that the whole house needs to be designed. Rather, the design parameter of the house can be limited to fragments of the house, i.e. the fragments of the house that connect with the garden.
This drawing process will revolve around the following research questions:
(1) How can you strengthen the garden as garden?
(2) How can you strengthen the house as house?
(3) How can you strengthen the garden by drawing an extension to the house in or into the garden?
(4) How can you strengthen the house by drawing an extension to the garden in or into the house?
The notions of Hortus Conclusus, as well as (partly) walled gardens, vegetable gardens (French: potager), patio, courtyard, porch, bay window, dormer window, reflective pond, birdhouse, … also will enter the discussions and the drawing process.
Transitions between the house and the garden, and their constitutive vegetations and lived ecologies will be precisely drawn on scale 1/10 (sections, fragments) and scale 1/1, with a specific attention to their precise material and technical realisations and the expressive agency of the architectural detail, especially the windows and architectural fragments that are facing the garden!
Method
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 2021) is key.
Drawing—mainly by hand—vertical sections of architectural fragments and details 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’ and ‘collage’: 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 house’s room and determine the atmosphere 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 will be either one of the sites of the investigated case studies (see above), or a site proposed by the student after being approved by the professor.
Network
ADO Studio Detail operates in an international network of research and practice:
- Ecole Fédérale Polytecnique de Lausanne (EPFL): prof. Jo Taillieu (Atelier Tomographie)
- Politecnico di Milano: Prof.dr. Gennaro Postiglione
- Studio Anatomy: www. studio-anatomy.org
- the TDC (Technical Documentation Centre of the faculty)
- the ongoing research of Jo Van Den Berghe, and the repository of 33 years of architectural practice of JVDB (full scale drawings of architectural details, investigation processes of architectural details, …) and related architectural practices
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:
- De Brabander, Lagrange and Van Den Berghe (2022). On the Fragility of Empathy: Drawing as Empathic Musing. PhD Thesis. KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture.
- Pérez-Gómez, A. (2006). Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics, MIT Press, Cambridge.
- Van Den Berghe, J. (2019). My Black Mariah and the White Chapel in the Fields. Drawing reflections for the Works+Words Biennial 2019, Royal Academy Copenhagen.
- Van Den Berghe, J. (2021). Critical Sequential Drawing: a drawing method to close the gap between the Poetic Image and its Material Presence. Stoa Journal 2, Dipartimento di Architettura Università. degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, pp. 168-179.
- many more references will be distributed at the introductory session and as the course proceeds.
[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.