Architectural Design V-IX: Material Gesture: Site Palestine (A.Holtrop)

Abstract

In this studio you will work in a workshop setting where you will research, design and experiment with the actual materials of your project. The material and the ways of making are not a representative outcome of the design studio, but an integral part of a process of working, researching and designing.

Objective

When we take all aspects of the material into consideration – the geology, the sourcing, the industry, the different properties, the craftsmanship, the specialised techniques and the cultural significance – we can deploy the full potential of the inherent qualities of the material itself and our way of working it in what we call MATERIAL GESTURE. Your research should be supported by the knowledge made available by our studio, and engaged through you with the use of available resources and facilities at departments of the ETH and from external specialists. Throughout the whole semester, and for your final presentation, we require that you work with physical (fragment) models of your building in the actual material(s). It is important, in this design studio, not to make a complete building, but to show and support the found values of the material engagement in a spatial way, based on the full potential of the inherent qualities of the material itself and your way of working it.

Content

It is our studio's approach that when all the material aspects of a SITE are taken into consideration: the geology, material sourcing, different physical properties, its associated craftsmanship, specialised technologies, and its cultural and political history, we can deploy the full potential of the inherent materiality of a SITE in relation to its territory. The SITE we will study and travel to during our seminar week is Palestine. Alongside local experts from architects to chefs and historians, we will study different places of production related to glass, soap, food, and stone. The seminar week will act as a laboratory to test ideas and plays a central role in the development of the projects. Each place of production will be allocated a budget to produce a spatial prototype based on the student's collaborative research: a space that is born from the site in its material consistency and that is constructed on that site, built, in harmony or contrast, to the previous gestures that have formed the geology of the place.

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