Architectural Design V-IX: Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat (A.Caruso)

Abstract

This semester will be an intentional return to the tangible. Working on a group of buildings around Helvetiaplatz in Zurich we will make projects for additions and transformations that substantially increase the capacity of these buildings and explicitly embrace making architecture.

Objective

Qualification to control the design process increasingly independent and with sole responsibility and to find to an individual design methodology and attitude.

Content

This semester will be an intentional return to the tangible. Working on a group of buildings around Helvetiaplatz in Zurich we will make projects for additions and transformations that substantially increase the capacity of these buildings and explicitly embrace making architecture. Using models and drawings we will develop and represent an architecture that is connected to our discipline’s long history of forms and techniques at the same time as being relevant today. Architecture that addresses our current predicament cannot only be a matter of upcycling and the adaptive re-use of existing structures. Although these are important themes, for architecture to continue to be culturally productive we need to discover the beauty that lies within the environmental turn. One way of doing this is to reframe the ways we think about cultural production and challenge the idea of the work of art as an autonomous entity. By engaging directly with the contingencies of material life, perhaps then, can we make a substantial and culturally engaged architecture of today. To help us reframe how we think about architecture we will study the ideas and work of six artists; Édouard Manet and Richard Prince, Auguste Rodin and Rachel Whiteread, Louise Lawler and Andrea Fraser. While admittedly very different, they all developed their work in ways that challenged the formal, social and institutional expectations of their times. While their practices respond to the conditions of different times, they are still relevant and speak powerfully to us today. The ideas, as well as the formal and material qualities of these artists’ work will inform our search for an architecture and a beauty for the 21st century.

Resources