Summer School: Workshop Valparaiso (in Collaboration with EPFL)

Abstract

This summer school it not taking place (COVID19) !Please do not register / cancel your registration!

Objective

Observation, analysis, 1:1 testing, drawing, design and collaborative working are the primary focus of the workshop. 1. Analyze the existing project and its site through observation, measurement and writing and be able to communicate the ideas drawn from this analysis with others. 2. Develop analytical drawing and model making to explore both the research topic and its potential application to the existing project. 3. Collaborate in a team to develop a coherent argument through drawing, model-making and prepare oral presentation of these elements. 4. Apply research prototypes for architectural solutions to the constraints of the project and its site through their transformation into full-scale, material assemblages using a reiterative process of testing and design. 5. Interrogate the specificity of the site and community through drawing and active participation in readings and lectures. 6. Collaborate on a work-site with a diverse group, while taking initiative, sharing knowledge and being respectful of the capacities of others and the safety of the work-site. During the Lausanne week of the project, learning outcomes are assessed through individual group desk critiques where analytical and design work is discussed and oral-feedback provided. Larger sessions, in the middle and at the end of the week, allow students to present their ideas to their colleagues who are encouraged to provide feedback. During the time in Chile, assessment happens as on-going discussion on the progress and development of student propositions, 1 on 1 discussion that happens naturally as we work alongside the students, and in more formal, structured sessions where student groups up-date each other on the developments of their work. In evening discussions of material from the “Building Cultures Valparaiso” publication, students are encouraged to participate and to lead the conversation with their questions and views on the text being discussed. Students will also be asked to keep a journal of there time during the workshop, comprising both written, drawn and photographic observations.

Content

Begun in 2014, the Open City Research Platform was initiated to provide undergraduate and masters level students an introduction to immersive full-scale construction that involves: - exposure to and participation in the alternative building culture developed over nearly 50 years through pedagogical and design research experiments at the Open City, a community of architects, poets and designers founded by members of the ead-PUCV in 1973. -A direct relationship to site where drawing and observation are used as tools for the analysis of environment. -A direct contact with materials, fabrication and assembly that draws on “low-tech”, hands-on construction methods. - A humanistic understanding of architecture’s relationship to other creative disciplines. - An opportunity to work and learn collaboratively with architects and engineers and in an interdisciplinary way on a research project. The Open City Research Platform was founded as a collaboration between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Lausanne (EPFL), and the Open City/ Corporación Cultural Amereida, a community of designers, architects and poets that has sustained itself on a coastal site near Valparaiso, Chile for nearly fifty years. Since 2014, this collaboration has brought together students from Switzerland and Chile to work on the incremental building of El Pórtico de los Huéspedes (The Threshold of the Guests) for the Open City. The goal was to create an innovative and interdisciplinary context that would make it possible to research on architecture through the pedagogy of making as a research that: - Positions the university student at the intersection between teaching and research. - Questions the boundary between the theoretical and the practical, between the academic and the professional. - Involves students in a creative process linked to the material, human and temporal realities of building; - Investigates how tacit knowledge is transmitted through experience. In the Open City, we found a context to address these questions through the incremental development of a project of an open duration. The research project sensitized EPFL and ETHZ students to fabrication as a collective act involving the community. Students build with rudimentary yet precise tools, such as the Japanese saw and readily available materials: local bricks, sections of Chilean pine, concrete mixed on site. In their collaborative work, testing different solutions, Swiss and Chilean participants research on different materials and tectonic possibilities and its use for innovative solutions. This encounter between two cultures of techné created conditions for knowledge exchange and broadened understandings of how the built environment, sustainability and development are linked to a local context. Objectives The Open City Research Platform will therefore use the summer workshop as a period where student participants carry out full-scale experiments in construction that are guided by the research interests of the organizers and are applied to the constraints and needs of the Open City. El Pórtico de los Huéspedes is understood as a platform welcoming interdisciplinary research and exploration, whether it be into building technologies as we propose for the next several years, or on other subjects related to the mission of the community and the larger school.

Resources