5 posts tagged “course”

Here are some images of the final review of the studio Sandra and I teached this semester at the Esarq in Barcelona. The studio is part of the Genetic Architecture Studio, a postgraduate course at the Universidad Internacional de Catalunya exploring novel architectural conditions emerging out of the collision of natural science and computational 

design techniques. This semesters task was to design a combination of Bar and Butterfly house on the premises of the parc Guell in Barcelona. The site marks one of the highest points of the park, unfolding in lavish views over Barcelona. The students explorations encompassed topological conditions as well as botanical phenomena such as veining and infloresce

Based on some of the recent explorations in our practice we designed this semesters task for the Students of the Dessau Institute of Architecture, Bauhaus Dessau: to scrutinize floral entities an their underlying geometric logic to create spatial conditions:

Back again in the Bauhaus we started this Semesters Advanced Design Techniques course. The course deals with two specific issues: Component driven Architectures and advanced fabrication techniques. As a role model for the idea of components we rely on the field of botany and here especially  on flowers. The course started with a presentation of this idea and some key terms the students have to use to develop their ideas: inflorescence, plication, venation and ornament. I´m pretty eager to see what the students are going to conceive based on this design environment and the line of thought emerging out of it. Especially the issue of ornament as spatial phenomenon can generate some polemic ideas, bearing loads of opportunities for architectural arguments, such as enclosure, structure,  spatial differentiation and so on. To develop a project the students were asked to pick up the site of the Gropius House at the Meisterhäuser, close to the Bauhaus, and replace the present postwar reconstruction with a new structure. 

It´s done. Last weekend we attended the final review of the Follymorph course Sandra and I teached at the DIA, Bauhaus Dessau. The scope of the workshop was to explore possibilities for architectural design emerging from a combination of selforganizational behaviour and computational design. The students had to explore an initial gypsum

model, an abstract machine that included various phenomena of emergent conditions. After the initial phase, they had to transcribe the observed phenomena using computational tools such as topological mesh modeling software and high en animation softwares. The phenomena were scrutinized for applications derived from discoursive issues such as Gradients, stratifications, viscous conditions and more. Finally they had to imply the architectonic task to create a stair or ramp within a Folly. This had to be depicted with the traditional tools of architecture: Plans and sections. You can find the blog of the course here

Final review of the Emergent Density module. Friday 20th of July 2007
The last weeks of work culminated in the final review. The board of critics included Oliver Bertram, head of the company Different Futures and Assistant at Greg Lynns studio of the Angewandte, Rainer Zettl, Assistant at W.D. Prix studio and main coordinator of Urban Strategies and Sandra and myself as the course Instructors. The allover quality of the body of work was appreciated by the board, and some good advises were given about possible further proceedings with the learnt design strategies. It was interesting to see that despite the general design strategy the final results formed a variety of possible solutions. Some projects approched the problem by creating an allover connected architectural entity. Other approaches included the dissolving of mass in fibrous entities, and the creation of cellular aggregations.