Special Questions in History of Art and Architecture: "Protect Us From What We Want"

Abstract

Have you ever resisted the urge to travel and tried to imagine your travel? That’s the experimental set up for the seminar. The idea is to split the participants of the seminar into two groups: travellers and non-travellers. In pairs (tandem partnerships), they will be interconnected through various media. The final outcome will be a video essay, which combines their findings.

Objective

Imagination and abstraction are important skills of the architectural profession. The seminar aims to train students in precise descriptions and to expand them with fictional content. Discussions will elaborate the advantages and disadvantages of traveling and being on-site. In the two different attentions of the students' tandem work, the digital experience and the real experience meet. Discussed are those elements and facts that benefit or come off worse due to the different perceptions.

Content

The seminar participants will be divided into 2 groups: A) Students who are "travellers", i.e. who participate in a seminar trip of any professorship; and B) "non-travellers", students who do not take a seminar trip in this semester. Mixed tandems will be formed among the participants. First, the students will be prepared for the seminar week in an architectural history introduction to research trips, discussion of texts read together. Afterwards, the seminar group will work with the tutors to identify questions and topics for the upcoming trips, and discuss possible tools and practices for "travellers" and "non-travellers". During the seminar trip, the tandem partners are in contact with each other. Both groups are given different tasks: The "travellers" document the trip, select the collected footage and upload it to the online platform while tagging it. The "non-travellers" perform a commentary function on the resulting footage and conduct in-depth thematic research. After the seminar trip, both groups meet again in the seminar room to exchange and discuss their experiences. Together, they review and classify the footage that has been created and collected. From this, the assignment is developed and considered with the students: The hybrid journey is to be produced in the format of a video essay by the tandem partners as a semester achievement under the supervision of the tutors.

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