Material Gesture

Abstract

We invite the students to dive into our material research archive to formulate their own project synopsis and elaborate on existing researches. Our archive consists of the following topics (and its associated experts and places of production): GYSPUM, SITE: KYUSHU (and its geology), WEAVING AND BONDING, STONE, TEXTILE, CHANGE, GLASS.

Objective

In this design studio, you will define your gestures of making and working with material(s) through research and experiment, and in response to the topic of the studio. You are required to produce an architecture that results from your specific engagement with the material and the spatial condition you construct with it. The architecture that results from this approach does not reference or represent something, but simply attempts to exist as a physical spatial reality in its own right. 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

The basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida wrote: from space, with its brother time under the persistent pull of gravity, feeling matter as a slower space, I ask myself, with wonder, what I do not know. Chillida, in one sentence, joins together what I believe are also the fundamentals of architecture: space, time, and matter, all under the persistent pull of gravity. In this semester we will focus on the fundamental of the fundamentals, that binds building and ground: gravitation. Chillida continues: … but what I really dream about is gravity. I am becoming more and more conditioned by gravity, by gravitation, - by this ideal line that runs from top to bottom, and naturally, from bottom to top. It was my preoccupation with gravity that led me to worry about matter. It’s not that I worry about matter, because I like iron, concrete, or stone, no. It’s that all works must be embodied in something: if not, then they are nothing, which presupposes a greater or lesser condition by that force, by gravity. All matter from the earth to the atoms are under the influence of gravity. To human perception, the transmissions of the forces and motions caused by gravity, seem to come from contact. The way a building transfers its loads through slabs and columns is eventually brought to its foundations, which in turn rest on the ground. At an atomic level, though, it is known that bodies in apparent contact, in fact, do not touch each other. There is always an empty space between them. Chillida adds to this, as he sees matter and space as inseparable, due to the fact that either space is very fast matter or matter is very slow space. And from this, he questions the boundary limit, not only between densities but also between speeds. I am interested in the processes all things undergo, the transitions from one state to another. How molten glass can set and solidify. Or how in Michael Heizer’s Vertical Displacement works, he proposed, for example, Appenzell, to frost crack a gigantic solid piece of rock and let it slide down the slope, leaving all its marks by its enormous mass. Transitions and processes that always include the presence of gravity. In this semester we will with gravity influence space with matter and influence matter with space.

Resources