SURRENDER RESISTANCE 2024-25
FIXING THE FLOW ‘solid, fluid and misty waters’
Tutor(s): Thierry Berlemont and Guests Semester: 1
Engagement: Mediating Tactics Language: English
Campus: Brussels
Pictures:
© YOSIGO, flickr.com/photos/yosigo/
© Anthony GORMLEY, Blind Light 2007
//MAINFRAME
SurrenderResistance is a design studio centred on experiment and speculation. It proposes an extended moment of re-orientation or re-set at a critical hinge-moment in a learning process and aims at a reflection on critical points of architectural interest. The core of the studio’s approach is the relation of the student with a phenomenon, problem or experience, and its associated critical point or singularity, where known laws no longer apply, become extreme, or even contradictory.
This is expressed by the twin-concept SURRENDERRESISTANCE that signifies an apprehension of issues from the perspective of ambivalence and paradox. It is joined by a partner-concept that provides topical support and an additional means for orientation. This year it will be ‘FIXING THE FLOW – solid, fluid and misty waters’.
Both constitute the reference for the calibration and balancing of one’s own position. This position is dynamic, but not pre-defined or pre-supposed. The studio aims at providing the space to let it take shape, grow, transform and mature within a process of questioning by means of design and making. A general question to consider is how we can, from an architectural perspective, give shape to something that we do not yet know or understand, but that is nonetheless critical and highly space-time oriented? How does this affect our perception of existing relationships, and how does it lead to new ones? How can we, by means of this process, reveal something crucial, necessary, helpful or relevant about and for architecture and architectural practice? Do we, as architects, have a responsibility regarding the issues under scrutiny, and if so, how can we contribute to them? Do we enthusiastically join a given movement or tendency, or do we interrupt it, build an opposition and join the resistance? It is an opportunity for finding new sources, and r(e-)orient personal fields of interest or commitment towards architecture and society.
//PROCEDURE
The student generates and implements architectural topics and strategies by means of simulations and tangible material installations. Those will be produced on a weekly basis and used as means of conversation and assessment of ideas and proposals. The studio provides both a material and social space – including cooking and sharing the table – for a process-oriented development that is organised in chapters:
- REVELATION: The excavation of themes
- IMMERSION: The intensive examination of the theme and the mapping of the field
- EXTRACTION: The extraction of sub-themes, existing or untouched, that show the potential to be developed more in This is named “X”. The extraction-phase leads to a first viewing halfway the semester to which external participants will be invited.
- PRODUCTION: The speculative process of defining and developing the X
- RELEASE: This is the process of making public, e. delivery, disclosure and transmission of the newly projected and constructed architectural substance in a spatial form still unknown and to be created.
//OUTPUT
- At this stage the expectations regarding outcomes are open and undefined, quite simply because the landscape of conceivable questions and responses is as yet unknown and will have to take shape during the What is certain though, is that outcomes will by necessity have to be articulated materially, and be multi-modal, i.e. making use of the plethora of expressive possibilities that is available in the world of architecture.
- During both dedicated studio weeks -in the middle and at the end of the semester- the process will be intensified by means of a five-day/full days workshop (hopefully/preferably in residency outside of campus).
- At the moment of closure of the process, the outcome of the studio will have to open up to an exterior world and go into conversation with How and where these actions/events will take place still needs to be defined.
- At some intermediate points in space and time during the semester, the studio SurrenderResistance will connect with the master thesis studio ‘Fixing the Flow – Water/Weather Matters’, in order to create opportunities for exchange on the issues at hand in both studio
//ASSUMPTIONS
A participation in the studio requires conversational skills and the mastery of multiple media, techniques/ technology, architectural construction and theory/philosophy. It also demands an open inquisitive mind, curiosity, a fearless experimental attitude, a capacity to put yourself at risk somehow by leaving behind the usually trodden paths, and the will to use design and making as primary tools. It implies a genuine dedication towards others and to learning. This means that you will be asked to share the invaluable knowledge and (life-)experience you already acquired and to put it at the disposal of everyone else involved in the studio.
Surrender/Resistance is part of the Master-Engagement ‘Mediating Tactics’, in which the discipline and practice of architecture, and the role of the architect in contemporary society, is being questioned.