STUDIO OVERVIEW
Architecture always exists on two levels. On one level we find an architecture that is actually present, whether as a built structure, such as the house you live in, or as an unbuilt structure presented in an architectural drawing, which could be historical or contemporary, realistic or fantastical. On the other level we find an architecture hiding behind this first one. It’s the architecture of a system that puts the elements together, not physically but mentally and methodically, an architecture that is permeated by possibilities, options, and choices. This second architecture is much larger than the first one, and is always—consciously or not—a system of rules that regulates and stimulates the interactions between its parts. It’s a procedure that is completely dynamic and machine-like, often affecting not only the positions of the elements but also their internal transformations. This is what we call “the game of architecture,” which can be a solitary game or a game between opponents, which can be either won and stopped or be played indefinitely without winners, and when used for architectural design it can remain mobile or switch to stable form. In this research-based studio, students worked in pairs, choosing from one of the following games:
1. The Gothic Tracery Game: This game studies the figuration methods of window tracery, which are far more complex than the historical vocabulary of ogives, ogees, mouchettes, soufflets, etc. suggests. The C-, J-, and S-figures, each with their own range of variation in depth and symmetry, quickly leads to complex pairs and groups that allow for complex configurations, making the Gothic the only style to successfully reverse the order between structure and ornament.
2. The Art Nouveau Game: After a full (19th) century of Neogothic architecture, Art Nouveau began to shake off its medieval influences to develop a completely original set of figures based on plant-life and an obsession with dreams and spirits. Like the Gothic, however, Art Nouveau succeeded in directly linking structure and ornament, with the central “whiplash figure” at its conceptual core where a straight vertical slowly develops increasing curvature to end up in a tendril that links up to other elements.
3. The Three-Wall Set Game: A strange spatial system can be observed in film- and TV-studios where a large technical space contains sets of home interiors that are necessarily kept open on one side to allow access for cameras and lighting to film the actors. Such an architectural set up not only suggests a doubled-up notion of space, but also a double notion of the design of space that combines structural tectonics and projective stereotomy.
4. The Stuffing Game: Somehow things are not objects, while things are also not stuff, nor is stuff the same as a mess, and a mess not the same as trash. In the tension between those ontological states lies the secret of living in a home. Objects have clear contours, things are more complex and can mean far more than objects, while stuff hovers between what is stored (in drawers, on shelves, in the attic, under the bed) and things that are on the verge of being forgotten. Stuff is the very thickness of space, and we will study strategies of thickening.
5. The Rococo Stucco Game: Of all architectural movements and styles Rococo is the one which has celebrated the surface more than any other architectural element. This obsession was applied to all scales, from the largest room to the smallest ornament. Rococo rooms strive to be completely different from each other (ovals, squares, ellipses, rectangles, triangles), while leaving huge pockets of poché between them, with their surfaces full of profile and encrusted by the strangest calcified creatures. Our game will be about finding the link between poché and encrustation.
6. The Noise & Mess Game: When the six-year old daughter of the famous cybernetician, Gregory Bateson, asked her father what entropy was, he answered that “there are a million times more ways to make a mess of your room than ways to have it ordered.” Not only domestic life needs to be lived toward entropy, all information strives for the same state. Why can a book be read in hundreds of ways? Why can a sentence be read when words are cut in half? In how far can forms be broken up and scattered, and what is the space between the pieces that allows for this?
7. The Polychrome Game: The color circle is truly the most wonderful thing: while the linear spectrum puts violet and red at opposite sides, the circle connects them directly by putting violet between red and blue. How is that even possible? Color can be broken as well as merged, that is, it can be mixed in or be a patch within a field. Their coexistence and interdependence suggests a space that can be inhabited, instead of merely offer colors that surround us. We will study patterns of tints and nuances as well as contrasts and shifts.
8. The Moulding Game: Nothing is as fascinating as the pages full of moulding profiles in old architecture books. In an era that has still not shaken off the smoothness of modernism we should try to understand the complex information hidden in the variety of profiles. The variation and ordering of the sharp angles, the curves curving inward and those curving outward, alternating in different combinations and sizes, offer us a view in this high art of traits and traces. What if the spaces that view the moulding is the same space that molds them? We will inhabit both sides of the profiles, the face and the head.
9. The Da Messina Game: The fabulous 1475 painting—St. Jerome in His Study—by Antonello da Messina of the theologian Jerome of Stridon sitting in and on some kind of architectural shape that is neither a piece of furniture nor a room, suggests that architectural space is not what is enclosed by rooms, but something that hovers between the rooms, like a gameboard or a stage where fragmented elements interact by affecting and transforming each other. How does the space in the pieces relate to the space between them?
10. The Steinberg-Perec Game: After seeing Saul Steinberg’s famous drawing of a cut-away façade showing twenty-three interiors exposing the lives of their inhabitants (“Art of Living,” 1947) the French author Georges Perec conceived of a novel (Life A User’s Manual, 1978) where a Parisian apartment block is divided up into a 10-by-10 grid, in which stories are told according to a jumping algorithm that allows each square to be occupied only once. Can we use such a game a design technique for an apartment block that generates stories instead of following program?