Architectural Design V-IX: Voluptas S1E8 Repetition/Difference (Charbonnet/Heiz)

Abstract

"Difference/Repetition" invokes identity and sameness, evolution and change, patterns and habits, originality and copy, time and recurrence, beat and rhythm. All things seemingly constant, all shades of their endless variations. How may such abstract notions contribute to shape immaterial processes and crystallize timeless and paradigmatic urban environments?

Objective

The careful and critical consideration of architectural paragons, socio-economical dynamics, geopolitical shifts, further endowed with the lure of fiction, shall initiate new beginnings to alternate (hi)stories and cityscapes. Objectives: Research & curation of contemporary concepts, articulation of a discursive argument, visual literacy & storytelling, image montage & composition, architectural drafting and projecting. Incentives: Movies & scenario, territorial & urban scale, collectivity, situations & artefacts, socio-political dimension, critical position, contemporary conditions. Steps: (1) Analyze a movie, research contemporary concepts, identify potentials, articulate a critical position. (2) Project an urban scenario on both the artefactual and the territorial scale, focusing on collectiveness and the socio-political aspects of society. (3) Express a critical position towards a contemporary condition by the means of such a fictive context in both image and plan. (4) Train rhetoric and argumentation, master drafting skills as well as image montage.

Content

Pursuing our rambling exploration on the lookout for urban environments beyond reasonable and more than ever considering humankind as embedded in, acting upon and dependent on its geological era, we shall look upon history’s intertwined layers and sediments as raw potential to be appropriated and composed with – joyfully disrespecting scientific authenticity. The visionary Hístor seeks, finds novelty in the old, rather than an unfounded assertion of the present with the past. This semester aims at both designing erratic hyper-contexts generated by hypothetical ruling incentives, and the obsessive recording of their past and present traces of erasures and becomings. Project: Students interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in a source movie, before transcribing their subjective reading to a telling but suggestive cinematographic draft (1.80x1.80m). Audacious and unprecedented urban environments are then extrapolated from the narrative, as singular metropolitan orthoimages (1.80x1.80m) become the recording canvas of these proliferating storylines. Furthermore, students will construct an argumentative arsenal to support their discursive argument, based on an encyclopedic compilation of evocative historical sources. The complementary drawing, image and discourse crystallize the fictional metropolis’ shared desires and aspirations in an effort to re-write alternate architectural and territorial fictions and reflect critically on contemporary conditions, overthrowing socio-economic status quo.

Resources