Architecture Thinking Masters Program

Program Coordinator: D Hauptmann

General Program description
In the past decade a shift has taken place within disciplines which rely on such designations  as theory and practice.  The Architecture_Thinking  courses will investigate these changes, first with respect to what has commonly been referred to as an ‘end' or an ‘after' of theory echoes of which began to be heard in the 1990's with the general pronouncements of a new problematic coming full force in the first few years of the 21st century.  The courses approach the current condition of architecture and urban theory with a ‘radical openness' with regards to thinking within specific disciplinarities. Deleuze, his ‘concepts' and ‘thought models will provide for significant  areas of investigation. For instance, what he refers to as Expérience /  Experimentation;  in Deleuzian parlance: experimentation does not ‘interpret', does not look for ‘significations' or ‘meanings' (of a drawing, a text, an idea, a desire, or a force); but seeks to discover how things work or function by  disclosing an order of causes, the affective relations between parts of an assemblage, the structures, the flows, associations and connections, the resulting understanding of tendencies over strictly traceable causalities.  Clearly, architecture - not what it is, but how it acts - with regards its geo-poetic / geo-politic realities; works within radically open structures and systems. Experimentation allows us to investigate, to analyze ways in which we can attempt to explain how assemblages come to be composed, to analyze the links between compounds or composites in order to understand how they might produce their effects; resulting in our ability to map new forms of empirical trajectories. Developing new means of both seeing and acting within design and theory, this we hold under the general frame referred to as ‘Architecture Thinking'.

DSD Graduation Studio: Architecture Thinking

 

• Course code: AR3DSD020 [AR4DSD020]

• ECTS: 15 [30]

• Course Type: Research & Design Studio

• Course Coordinator: A. Radman

Summary
The Architecture Thinking graduation studio makes a case for a pedagogy of the senses. In terms of our architecture thinking everything begins from the sensible, but the task of thinking is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible. This argument is pertinent given that the task of architecture, as we see it, is to distribute the sensible. This, in turn, means that the architect is working with sensation as material.

The Architecture Thinking program investigates contemporary theory, science, media and design discourses and practices in order to open up new ways of both perceiving and imagining architecture. If we inquire into the history of architecture, over the past forty years, we are struck by the complexity, the ambiguity of the adventure, qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces, new means of writing and drawing - of making  - were invented, ones which profoundly modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time.  Ones which were combined with a reflexivity within certain texts, certain buildings, that rendered them somehow indefinitely open in and of themselves, and in which there appeared something radically other - to see with the mind and think through the eye - this we hold under the general frame referred to as ‘Architecture Thinking'. We believe that architecture - not what it is, but how it acts - with regards to transdisciplinary realities; works within radically open structures and systems.

Thus, AT utilizes a Deleuzian thought-model of Experience/Experimentation. With this we understand experience in relation to the sensible and the role of experimentation as a process through which to discover how things work or function by disclosing an order of affective relations between the parts (structures, flows, associations and connections) that make up an architectural assemblage. This demands that we seek out the complex nature of socio-cultural tendencies over strictly traceable, and thus representational, causes.

Course Content
The basic medium of the discipline of architecture is "a field of experience," rather than geometry, design, critique, or any formal field. Its main content is movement and not the formal interpretation of meanings (of a drawing, a text, an idea, a desire, or a force). This is not to dismiss formalisations as either unnecessary or redundant, but as merely insufficient for laying out a single non-linguistic plane that fully integrates both subjects and objects.
Architecture has mastered metric (extensive) space all too well. We have yet to come to grips with the intensive space or spatium which always comes first. That is the ambition of the AT graduation studio.

Architecture Thinking graduation studio comprises two sequentially coupled semesters: Master 3 - Design and Research Studio is dedicated to the development of new design techniques that are specifically conceived to address the theoretical underpinning of the project. Among the curriculum of required DSD MSc3 course, students follow a course, Architecture Thinking Thesis, in which they produce a written theoretical thesis, which, in turn, provides the arguments required to support the design concepts advanced in the studio. Students will also follow a media course, Theory Project: Media Matters, in which they will learn to use and deploy diverse audio-visual media (in specific film and video) as aids in the development of design concepts and techniques. The Master 4 -Graduation Lab- will be dedicated to the development of a thorough architectural design project to meet the theoretical and experimental findings in Master 3.

The Fall 2011 AT studio will be taught by Gregory Bracken and the project will be located in Hong Kong. The Spring 2012 studio will be taught by Andrej Radman and the project will revolve around what Radman refers to as ‘somÆsthetics'.

Research Methods and Design Practices.

• Course code: AR3A160
• ECTS: 6
• Course Type: Lecture Series Research Methods.
• Course Coordinator: Dr. T.L.P. Avermaete & Ir. H.J. Engel
• Required: For both Architecture Thinking & Urban Asymmetries graduation studio students.

Summary

This lecture series deals with the intricate relation between architectural research and design approaches. It holds that there exist certain 'episteme' in the field of architecture in which a specific analysis of the built environment resonates with a particular architectural design approach. It focuses on the ways that architectural research can offer a basis for the delineation, formulation and composition of architectural projects. Out of this perspective architectural research is not considered as a value-free venture, but rather as an activity that reflects a clear frame of reference and intentionality.

 

Course Contents:

The lecture series consists of six twin lectures. The first two twin lectures focus on the modi and instruments of architecture.
The four remaining lectures are composed of:

• a theoretico-historic lecture in which an episteme is delineated and.
• an evaluation of the operativity of a certain research method and the related design strategy.

Gaols:

Against the aforementioned background this lecture series has a threefold goal:

• to offer an insight in the intricate relationship between research and design as two aspects of the same architectural episteme.
• to delineate and analyze some of the key episteme in the field of contemporary architecture.
• to illustrate the operativity of the episteme within contemporary research and design approaches.

New Urban Questions or Minor Infracions

 

• Course code: AR3DSD040
• ECTS: 3
• Course coordinator: Heidi Sohn
• Course type: Lecture Series
• Required: For both Urban Asymmetries & Architecture Thinking graduation studio students.

Summary
In this weekly lecture series we will explore the new urban questions that spring from and surround contemporary debates on architecture, urbanism, and the spatial disciplines, critically questioning the contemporary situation of urban environments as the locust of diverse epistemologies of space.

Each week expert guest speakers and researchers will present specific case studies, theorizing them, and relating them to the pressing 'new urban questions' of our contemporary world: what are the challenges brought about by these new developments? How can we read, understand, and critique these new urban environments of the 21st century?

Course Content
Since the publication of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity of 1990, many of the processes identified by Harvey and others have manifested themselves upon our contemporary human world: from the over-urbanization of the world's population, rapidly changing geopolitical configurations and shifting relations between State and civil society, the poignant environmental questions that plague us incessantly, to the encroachment of the media in our daily lives, the last decades of the 20th century appear to have functioned as a catalyst to capitalism in its advanced stages, rather than as a vehicle for emancipation, socio-economic improvement or general positive change.

The transition from modernity into postmodernity has been everything but straightforward, or unproblematic. One thing has become clear: under the logic of flexible accumulation, endorsed by the slogan of modernization, progress, and globalization, capitalism has managed to mutate once again into what appears to be an all-encompassing economic system that, backed by parallel transformations in all realms of human endeavor, has transformed not only our imaginaries and desires, but also our lifestyles, subjectivities and practices.

The logic of neoliberalism claims to be based on values and ideals that cannot be sustained in reality: instead of balance, it produces deafening homogeneity and uniformity; instead of 'difference' and variety, it thrusts informality. Troubled by a natural tendency to conflict and contradiction, neoliberalism and its many practices are (re-)producing extreme conditions of socio-economic polarization, environmental devastation, and more generally, differential conditions that generate degrees of unprecedented uneven development and asymmetries in all domains and scales.

These changes necessarily manifest themselves upon the built environment, producing changed relationships within localities, cities and entire regions, posing new urban questions for the 21st century. Such as: What are the new urban conditions brought about by the liberalization of the global economy? Where has 'the public' gone? Can we still speak of public spaces in the conventional sense under conditions of extreme commercialism and the dissolution of the political? What are the implications for the city? What is occurring in regions in which the transition into neoliberalism has occurred in partial occlusion, or invisibility? How are architects and urban designers reacting to these changes?

As entire cities rise from scratch in what was previously desert, and the peripheries of urban giants in the Third World consolidate into hyperslums, the role of architects and urbanist is called into question. Are we responding to the new urban problems and questions from a critical perspective, or are we perpetuating with our practice the 'Minor Infractions' that will shape the contradictive cities of the 21st century?

Theory Project: Media Matters

 

• Course code: AR3DSD070
• ECTS: 6
• Course type: Seminar and workshop
• Course coodinator: M Boumeester
• Required for: Architecture Thinking studio students

Summary
Media_Matters aspires to rapidly introduce students to media theory dealing with the production of the moving image, not only in use as a tool for architecture/urban mapping and social analysis, but also as an independent generator of alternative states of veracity. The combination of an investigation of the perceptual composition and constructed layering of classic cinema, and the hands-on production of contemporary audio-visuals, aims to increase the understanding of the potential of this medium and its place in the contemporary discourse on immersive media.

Participants will become able to make the transition from the static evaluation of what is happening "on the screen" to the active and versatile state of manipulating what is happening "in the screen".

Media_Matters will also explore the role of the agency of a moving image in a rapidly changing media environment, where the progressively fading distinctions in media topologies give way to an evolving participation of media production in the research and design of architectural and urban conditions.

The programme will address a range of functionalities the production of moving images can generate, varying from the contextualization of the global participator in the age of Prosumerism, the exploration and understanding of architecture and urban environments and its socio-economic conditions through intensive self-evolving experimental Cinematic Mapping techniques and onwards to the conceptual fields of the manufacturing of mediated alterities and other iso-affective constructions, within or outside of the virtual domain.

Course Contents
The program is structured to follow a path which starts at the centre (the individual) and spirals outwards to the collective (society), containing both canonical and topical elements it will jumpstart the participants knowledge to skilfully deal with the fascinating dominion of instable media and their assets.

Media_Matters deals with the following topics, among others:

• Enter the arena, the fallacy of affective veracity; messages from the Parastrata
• Time; now and never: Seven Avatars of Time
• Sensing; departure imminent, destination unknown
• Tracing; Traceurs in ether
• Mapping; intentional institutions
• Memory; sheets of conversion and the recollection image
• Cinema 1; iso-affective constructions
• Cinema 2; obsolete paradigms versus the specificity thesis
• Recalibration of the middle; MCD and the social experiment / immersive automation
• Immersive media; augmented virtuality

On a weekly basis an introduction will be given to one of the specific topics, followed by an assignment that connect with the theme at hand. The accumulated knowledge and skills will eventually be put into use to construct the final assignment. Alongside with some compulsory reading, there will also be a list of audio-visuals that need to be seen. Sessions will be collective, but the assignments will be done individually. 

DSD Architecture Thinking SOMAESTHETICS Graduation Studio

[Also see description for AR3DSD020 above]

As Robin Evans diagnosed, the peculiar disadvantage under which architects labour is that they never work directly with the object, but through an intervening medium which is almost always the drawing, "while painters and sculptors, who might spend some time working on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all end up working on the thing itself." The paradoxical separation between the doer and the deed often causes architects to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by treating concrete actual entities as if they were categories of thought or representation. The ARCHITECTURE THINKING SOMÆSTHETICS STUDIO seeks to invigorate radical empiricism as a means of tapping not into the solipsistic world of design, but rather into the relation of exteriority or the design of the world. Such anti-representational disposition resonates strongly with Felix Guattari's Ethico-Aesthetics, or experimentation that seeks to circumvent obstacles in the formal structure of power, whether it be neoliberal democratic or Marxist revolutionary, constituted by Habermasian consensus or conversely by Mouffe's agonism.

SOMÆSTHETICS is our shorthand for what contemporary neuro-cognitive sciences classify under the dynamical animal-environment system approach. Perception cannot be considered independently because it is defined as an evolved adaptive and constructive relation between the life-form and its environment. The founder of the ecological school of perception James Jerome Gibson insisted that perception is for action. Consequently, the environment - as the lawful source of information about the risks and opportunities afforded - cannot be considered independently of perception either. The traditional chasm between the "two cultures" - quasi-objective scientific empirical and quasi-subjective humanistic speculative - as well as categories of knower and known, thus become obsolete. Gilles Deleuze's advice is to start from the middle instead.
PROGRAMME: Bouwkunde Reloaded (from the original brief www.buildingforbouwkunde.nl)

Start from the middle we will, with the help of MEDIA MATTERS. We will turn to the practice of mapping which creates a radical anamnesis of "what is going on in what happens," and abandon the strategy of tracing which merely reveals the facticity of "what happens." The search for unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being, requires embracing the concept of actualisation of the virtual and their reciprocal determination, rather than the realisation of the possible. The ultimate goal of the SOMÆSTHETICS studio is to debunk hylomorphism, where form is imposed upon inert matter from without and where the architect is seen as an exclusive source of agency. Instead, it aims to promote an alternative morphogenetic approach by making effective dis-connections beyond the dichotomy of ritual participation and intellectual contemplation. It is this way that the discipline of architecture can escape the shackles of the Linguistic Turn and reclaim its vanguard position within the Epigenetic Turn to embrace tekhne as constitutive of (post)humanity, and not just the other way around.

"Ask not what is inside your head but rather what your head is inside of."