TO BE DECIDED

2021-22
Structural Contingencies: To Be Decided
Team: Steven Schenk en Johannes Berry
SEM 3, Ghent
EN
Engagement: Craftsmanship

With the wide acceptance of cartesian thought, the formalization of science, and the subsequent romanticism surrounding objective reality, we moderns have come to believe that we have changed our society and surroundings permanently. With this we have come to believe that we have separated or even freed ourselves, from our ancestors’ previously primitive or even ignorant ways of understanding and creating constructs of reality.

This attitude has given preference to the construction of systems that further abstract our relationship and understating of our surroundings, through the separation, in different ways, of politics, science, technology etc. from nature.

This studio is interested in revisiting pre-modern – innate to human – phenomena that migrates the thin line, or paradox, between culture and nature in creating constructs of reality, through architecture.

It investigates the modalities through which an architectural project can be developed, in order to address these unspoken, pre-modern dimensions in architectural form and space.

It aims at the reworking of a mental landscape

for the sake of architectural production,

for the sake of a student that is about the finish his education,

for the sake of aiming towards a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibilities

in the imagining and understanding of architectural artefacts.

In doing so, the aim is to address a deeper, coherent sensibility beyond cultural, historical, political etc. differences. This studio will have a bi-weekly interaction with Japanese architects in the form of guest lectures and critiques (Guests TBC). Together with the interaction with interesting guests we want to re-imagine the paradoxical relationship between nature and culture, to reaccept as humans both past, present and future.