| Description |
How do we begin with architecture?
This question arises urgently when the university is understood as a collective and reciprocal process, when the discipline responds to profound social, ecological, and technological transformations, and when students take part in shaping foundations that are no longer—or perhaps never were—fixed. Our first core module is structured around workshops that are designed by the participants themselves. They present and collectively practice architectural and artistic methods of working, as well as various techniques of representation. Within a collective teaching/learning structure based on rotating roles, we explore architectural techniques, multiperspectival knowledge, and critical positions—each contextualized theoretically, historically, and societally. The aim is to foster situated spatial practices, process-based approaches, and open, critical thinking in architecture—through collective inquiry, doubt, representation, and making. In doing so, we question systems of recognition and exclusion, competition as well as the power and representational structures of the discipline and the Western academic world. We understand architecture as a socially engaged transformative spatial practice to imagine and create a more just collective life. We see in it the potential to represent the world beyond individual buildings that exist along with various living and non-living beings, bodies, actors, times, geographies, societies, and cultures. We believe that architecture can contribute to other future worlds, and to different relationships we have with living beings, things, land, and resources. We think architecture should neither be limited nor restricted by professionalism nor neoliberal motivations. Again: How do we begin with architecture? How do we use representations and design methods to pose spatial, social, and ecological questions? Which visual-cognitive, imaginative practices help us address the production of space and the social, material, and historical structures —the ways we inhabit the world? How do we define what is informal and formal space-making? What can we learn from architecture that is built without architects? In the project, we aim to open up, test, learn, fail and discuss a spectrum of concrete methods to practice representation and design as spatial analysis and synthesis techniques. In addition to material experiments, cartography, drawing, and model making, we use text, photography, video, storytelling, food and machine learning. To explore the possibilities of approaches to architectural representation and image-making beyond the Eurocentric conceptualizations, we will look at historical and contemporary representation methodologies from Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America. Accompanied by guest lectures and workshops we will move together towards a collective and expanded understanding of the discipline of architecture. |
