The Incomplete Project

THE INCOMPLETE PROJECT I STUDIO 1 I THE (EXTRA)ORDINARY PROPOSITION

TUTOR: Prof. Doug Allard
CAMPUS: Ghent
LANGUAGE: EN
ENGAGEMENT: Craftsmanship
SEMESTER 1

Head image: Christian Troelstrup Clothing Store, Copenhagen, 1936, image © National Geographic

THE INCOMPLETE PROJECT I STUDIO 1 I THE (EXTRA)ORDINARY PROPOSITION

“You don’t need a house. You need a village in a forest.”
Ryue Nishizawa, 2017
From an interview with the architect concerning the Moriyama House and his response to the clients brief, Tokyo, 2005

What if a school could become a landscape? A house a village? A library a garden?

Architecture may begin with a programme, but it does not have to end there. This studio asks what happens when the given programme is treated not as a fixed definition, but as the starting point for something more open, unexpected and unfinished.

This studio asks how an ordinary architectural requirement might become an extraordinary proposition, not through fantasy alone, but through a precise and radical rethinking of what a building programme could become.
Studio participants will investigate how architecture can exceed the expectations of its programme, exploring the space between what a building is asked to be and what it might become.

“Architecture is fantasy made of precisions.”
Gio Ponti

Image: Hanging Gardens of Babylon. 17th-century artwork, image© New York Public Library.

THEME
The programme is not the architecture.
The studio investigates what happens when a familiar programme is radically reinterpreted. How might a building become something other than what its programme appears to prescribe?

MAGGIE
A Maggie’s Centre : a place for living, support and connection.
Students will work from the Maggie’s Centre programme and architectural brief, but are asked to question how that programme might become something else: a building as a garden, a village, a landscape, a tower, a journey…, …an entirely different proposition.

Maggie’s Centres are places of support designed to feel more like homes and gardens than institutions. Each responds to the same carefully considered brief, yet each is radically different. The series includes buildings by internationally recognised architects including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Steven Holl, Benedetta Tagliabue, Heatherwick Studio and Amanda Levete.

https://www.maggies.org/our-centres/
https://www.maggies.org/about-us/buildings-and-architecture/

SITE
A common site in Brussels provides a shared ground for the projects. The site is fixed, but the architectural response is deliberately open.
Each student will develop a different proposition for the same place, exploring how the same programme can generate very different forms of architecture.

METHOD
The studio is built around looking, making and discussing.
Existing projects are used not as models to copy, but as provocations: to discover how architecture can interpret a programme otherwise. Ideas are developed through drawings and physical models, and continuously tested through small-group discussion around the table.

Each project develops through three interconnected stages:

A — CASE
A short creative investigation of a self-selected built architectural project that radically reinterprets its programme.

B — ABSTRACT
An individual architectural proposition, developed from the studio programme and site, distilled into a fundamental architectural figure.

C — ARTEFACT
The architectural proposition further developed and distilled into two artefacts: an abstract (physical) model and an unfolding book.

TABLES
Mirroring the way we work at XDGA, the studio sessions are organised around a table.
Students work on individual designs, but projects are continually looked at, questioned and discussed collectively at a table, in small groups of four or six.
The table is a place for presenting unfinished work, testing ideas, exchanging references and developing projects through conversation.

COLLABORATION & GUESTS
The studio is developed in dialogue and collaboration with XDGA, an internationally active architectural practice based in Brussels and Paris, bringing together around 60 independent architects from 14 countries.
An XDGA Atelier Day will bring students and architects together to discuss emerging propositions and ways of working.
The studio will also include visits to selected XDGA buildings, the studio and the practice’s model workshop, offering a direct insight into architectural processes, making and experimentation.

https://xdga.be/
https://divisare.com/authors/2144617977-xdga

MAKING
“Why are things like that made?”
— Maarten Van Severen, Werken | Work, 2004

How we make is intrinsic to how we think, and vice versa.
Making is therefore not simply a means of representing a project, but a way of investigating and developing it.

Physical models will play a central role throughout the studio but all forms of investigation and presentation are possible.
The act of making will remain central to the design investigation.

PRACTICAL
All information and on the studio will be available on an (online) shared studio drive and provided to all students at the beginning of the semester.
Each week, an agenda for the table sessions will set out the focus and activities for the day.
The studio drive will be used to share, collect and archive references, lectures, texts and proposals throughout the semester.

EVALUATION
Projects will be evaluated through the quality of their architectural proposition, the clarity and precision of their thinking, and the relationship between programme, site, drawing and making.
Particular attention will be given to the ability of the project to exceed the expectations of its programme and to develop an unexpected proposition that opens the programme to new architectural possibilities.
The Case, Abstract and Artefact will each form part of the evaluation.

A FIRST LOOK
Please have a look at these short but inspirational film clips:

MORIYAMA SAN (Trailer)
An inspirational project from an extraordinary proposition :
view the trailer for the documentary film over the Moriyama House here.

AT WORK (Clip)
An inspirational example of the dialogue between thinking and making,
please look at the short video (fragment) over Maarten Van Severen here.