Generally, buildings are designed and developed by thinking about big ideas context, social and cultural issues, and massing. While all perfectly reasonable places to begin, these starting points relegate the details, which are often essential to their ultimate outcome, to play a more subservient role in the process. Our studio was interested in moving back and forth between these two radically different scales of thinking, one being the scale of the building and the second being a smaller scale detail. The studio developed an inside out approach towards design by questioning the part to whole relationship between objects, structure, envelope and site. The studio aimed to disrupt our conventional relationship with architectural compositions and to rethink the correlations between familiar objects and their assemblies.
Studio Unit
The studio develops narratives through a curatorial approach and set creation, to form architectural narratives about the nature of the workspace and the objects that lie within.
The studio engages in cyclical feedback between making, drawing and modeling; constantly moving in between analog and digital mediums. Transitioning between these two realms will allow students to be opportunistic with the advantages each tool holds, and offer opportunities for novel translations of the project at various stages.
Students formulate speculative chunk models; mesh-based techniques are integrated with traditional orthographic modeling. A strong emphasis is placed on representations through light, material, colour and pattern.
From Objects to Architecture : Students are encouraged to formulate a personalized workflow and aesthetic, with a strong emphasis on graphical representations and critical design enquiry.
Models are fine tuned to adhere to program specifics, context, material and graphics without diluting the aesthetic and formal attitude of the preliminary design investigations.
