Architectural Design V-IX: Exactitude (A.Theriot)

Abstract

When one dismantles a car, one is first struck by the diversity and hierarchy of its parts. The largest components - doors, hood, chassis - form the outer shell that defines the vehicle’s exterior image. As the dismantling continues, one reaches the internal systems: radiator, gearbox, brakes, transmission. Then, moving closer to the engine, the parts become ever smaller, down to elements of extre

Objective

Methodology The aim is to take advantage of economic requirements to transform constraints into levers that produce qualities. These qualities can be material or immaterial, prosaic or poetic, constant or unstable, general or occasional. As long as they are initiated by the economy and located far from any rationality. Creating generosity, the ‘excesses’ that make a place strong and unique. The semester will be divided into three chapters: Chapter 1 Mythology Chapter 2 Finding freedoms Chapter 3 Binding fragments Integrated workshops Reto Lui Jung, Jungbach, designer / metal works Toby Buechel, Buechel technical, automation / programming Arnaud Bostelmann, model photography Francesco Clerici, film Jacqueline Pauli, structure Gontran Dufour, façade and envelope Car Disassembly Workshop In collaboration with the mechanics of HEZ ETH Garage, Jan Viriden and Martin Weidler, we will start the semester by dismantling a car. A two-day exploration of the automobile as sculpture, architecture, and performance. We dismantle not just to take apart, but to understand, reframe, and reimagine - to understand how joints are assembled and form emerges. From the first collective gesture to the final display, each group will carry a system through its own journey of deconstruction and re-presentation. This will be the starting point for the first chapter of the semester, where Lui Jung and Toby Buechel will accompany as to re-assemble and re-imagine the parts of the car to transform it into something else.

Content

Each part is shaped by its function: fender, steering wheel, belt, or spark plug declare, by their very form, their role in the whole. To dismantle is therefore to learn through action: separating, naming, laying the parts out on the ground, grasping their order. Little by little, the apparent chaos of scattered pieces turns into a cartography, a mental diagram of the overall functioning. Yet a machine does not exist only through the perfection of its fittings. It also lives through its margins. Between two parts, there is always a gap - tiny, calculated - that allows movement, fluidity, endurance. Without these intervals, the engine would seize up immediately. Absolute precision, paradoxically, would kill the mechanism. It is these interstices, these infinitesimal beats, that keep the whole alive. By extrapolation, the same is true of architecture. The assembly of a building cannot be reduced to an exact juxtaposition of drawings and measurements. To design “to the millimeter” does not mean abolishing all uncertainty but rather organizing where uncertainty can exist. As in mechanics, certain parts of a project must remain open, tolerant, adjustable: construction details to be specified during the building process, proportions to be tested at full scale, spaces destined to evolve with use. Exactness in architecture does not mean striving for infallibility. On the contrary, it is about preserving a space for breathing, for vibration. The most accurate drawing is not the one that anticipates every detail of the future reality, but the one that gives the project the possibility to find its own reality, sometimes slightly shifted from the original intention. To build today is therefore to accept this double requirement: to respond to injunctions of precision, economy, ecology, while also embracing the share of in-exactitude that makes the project alive. Thus, the imperative of exactness can be transformed into a learned right to inexactness. The highest degree of precision is in fact to allow for a possibility of imprecision, to authorize the imprecision through which the project can unfold. It is within these zones of fluctuation that the best margins of freedom can emerge.

Resources