Description
FIRST PART
Each response: 300 words minimum. Please be strategic and proactive with your language.
1. What are the main critical issues that the work engages? The main contemporary topics, inspirations, desires, investigations that the work tackles?What is it that captures your imagination about this work?
2. Is there anything in the architect’s background, experience, education, cultural context, or geographic specificity that has influenced the evolution of the work?
3. Why is the work of this particular architect relevant today? Is there something about the work that can inspire new paradigms to re-think conventional architecture? Why is it unique about the work?
4. How are these critical contemporary issues manifested spatially, materially, programmatically and formally, in this particular practice?
5. What are the main tools of representation (drawings, models, films, installation?) For this architect, what role do they play in the creative process? How does this architect engage the creative process?
6. How has this work alter your perceptions of what architecture is for you? How is this architecture different to the architecture that is conventionally built?
7. Can this work scale up to reimagine the way we build cities? In what way?
8. Can you summarize what is important about this particular building? Can you summarize the main ideas, the main qualities, etc. This will serve as an introduction to the visual portfolio!
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SECOND PART- Philippe Rahms Jade Eco Park Taiwan
Visual Research to Interpret the Architectural work
The second part will be primarily visual. You will focus on studying a particular building or project from the architectural practice you researched in the first part of the quarter, in order to further elaborate on the understanding of the work. The main intention here is to visualize, narrativize, theorize the ‘main strategies’ that were part of the conceptualization of the work and its realization.
In other words, can you ‘pull the building apart’? and speculate on how are the architect’s main intentions theorized, materialized, spatialized, through this building? This is an exercise to ‘design in reverse,’ meaning, by ‘unpacking’ this building, you will be able to retroactively reveal the architects’ design intentions, and learn from them. The idea here is to find out if there is something about the architects’ work that can inspire new methods for your work as an artist, as researcher, as designer.
To achieve this, you will develop a visual analysis, to ‘translate’ the particular work, and gain a conceptual understanding of the main intentions of the work, and its design process. These can include diagrams, drawings, sketches, etc.,that you invent (possibly inspired by what you might find in the publications you researched), to tell the story of the main ideas behind the building; or small maquettes, models, constructions, a film, an animation, a stop motion graphic system, collages, etc. In essence, you need to design and produce visual tools that can help you visualize and deeply understand the main concepts behind the building.
To help guide this visual research, you will develop visualizations to interpret, translate, and speculate design intentions, across 10 main categories (I will go over each of these categories in more detail, during special portfolio orientation sessions on Thursdays):
1. Contextural
The context within which the architecture is set,the immediate physical context, but also the cultural, climatic, social context?
2. Programmatic
Architectures respond to programs of ‘use’, among many other conditions, often in response to particular typologies, or human behaviour, etc.,i.e. Amuseum responds to the way a museum should function; and architects articulate this programmatic function in a variety of ways.
3.Cartographic:
Plans-SectionsArchitects use a variety of visual tools to represent architecture. The most common are cartographic drawings that ‘explain’, ‘describe’ the function and spatial composition of a building. These are floor-plans (looking at the building from above, in a planimeric view, to understand measurable horizontal relationships-circulation, access, etc), and sections (‘slicing’ the build vertically to understand measurable vertical spatial relationships and dimensions-height, levels, etc..).
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4.Spatial-Perceptual
These are design conditions through which an architect explores the design of space itself and its qualitative phenomena. Here, your analysis should speculate on the quality of spaces, their proportion, their phenomenological, perceptual and emotive dimension, what do these spaces evoke? How are they articulated to produce such experiences?
5.Material
Buildings are made of materials, and often the architects that we will survey in this class do not use materials arbitrarily. Materials are an intrinsic part of the design, and the conceptualization of architecture. This includes, materials physical attributes, but also their economic and cultural significance.
6.Formal-Volumetric
Besides articulating measurable and descriptive conditions through plans and sections, and also imagining qualitative spatial phenomena, one of the main characteristic of architecture is that it is a formal system -even if sometimes architects are inspired by informal dynamics as we will see in the class. This means that architects have to create physical envelopes, volumetric studies, tectonic arrangements, to design and compose 3-Dimensional systems.
7.Structural
While formal and volumetric studies might pertain to the envelop, the skin of the building, architects have to collaborate with structural engineers to design the ‘bones’ of the building, the architecture’s structural attributes. Many of the architects we will study here do not see the formal and the structural systems as disparate parts, but as intrinsic to shaping an integrated ecology that responds to specific conceptual intentions.
8.Environmental -Systems
This pertains to a brief analysis of the architecture’s ‘environmental’ performance, the way the architects thought about climate, light, temperature, etc., both operatively and metaphorically (more on this in class). The way the architecture performs ‘systems-thinking’, across a variety of conditions.
9.Informational-management
Architectures are informational systems, operative tools that transfer’ a variety of cognitive, experiential and even ideological conditions, often emblematic of particular contemporary cultural, economic, political issues. This also includes ways by which the management of social and economic resources can be mobilized through architecture (More on this in class).
10. Conceptual
Finally, a set of visualizations that speculate on the main concepts behind the architecture’s design. This summarizes the main generative IDEA that gives shape to the architecture. This often is the first thing an architect does, but we have placed it as the 10th issue, because in a certain way, this item integrates everything else. So, after your understanding of all previous 9 items, you will be better equipped to generate a diagram or any other visual gesture to convey the architecture’s main concept.
Note: You are free to select a wide range of media to develop each of these categories in your portfolio. It can be that you explore each category above through different media, as necessary. In other words, each of these categories might need a different visual tool to express your interpretations and analysis of the work.
