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Francesca Woodmam. House No.4 (Providence Rhode Island), 1976 |
For witches and wizards
./studio 3
Colin Fournier / Astrid Dahmen
Innsbruck
2010-2011
Draft 01: 27.10.10
Preamble.
This design programme within Studio 3 will last for the whole academic year. This document defines in outline form the nature of the programme. This is the first draft of the programme. It will be updated regularly as the projects develop. At this point, the document focuses primarily on the first 3 stages of the programme.
Introduction
The programme ostensibly asks you to design a house for a witch or a wizard. Or possibly a house that, while not necessarily inhabited by either a witch or a wizard, is nevertheless a house of magic or a haunted house, a house that is not just functional, a house full of surprises, a house that maybe has a mind and personality of its own.
The hypothetical clients for this house need not be derived from the conventional notions of witches and wizards as drawn from traditional fairy tales, Gothic novels or even Harry Potter. It should preferably be a contemporary interpretation of these terms.
This is a most unusual programme. It encourages you to enter into the realm of fantasy, poetry, emotion, illusion, magic, the unconscious and surrealism.
It is interesting to note that many of the attributes of magic houses in fairy tales, in particular the classic proposition that such houses have, for example, doors that mysteriously open and close on their own, lights that turn themselves on and off without human intervention, sounds that appear to come from nowhere, have actually become reality; with the increasing number of sensors, cybernetic control systems, actuators and artificial intelligence now implanted and embedded within buildings, one can say that architecture has, in many respects, become sentient and magical, like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
But these are still rather prosaic examples: it is up to you to dream up what the house of the witch and wizard might be and to be wild in your imagination and experimentations.
This programme will take you through a number of successive stages, as follows:
Stage 1: Definitions and concepts
The first stage is for you to define the realm you are going to explore: What are witches and wizards? Explore the definitions of the terms. In other words: who are your clients? What are their powers? What are their needs? Are their needs any different from those of ordinary human beings? Is the magic something that you should consider to be attributed to them, as occupiers of the house, or to the house itself?
Think about these questions and define your immediate reaction to the programme, the conceptual territory you think you are going to be exploring.
You will be expected to write down succinctly, before starting your research, your initial definitions and concepts.
Submission: Title and short text of 200 to 300 words.
Date due: Friday Nov 3, 2010, before 12:00.
Place: Cyberspace.
Presentation format: By e-mail t. Word document. The e-mail title of the file should be your family name followed
by your first name followed by “W1: Concept”.
Example: “Einstein Albert. W1: Concept”.
This coding system will facilitate the alphabetical listing of the e-mails.
Stage 2: Research. Sources of inspiration
What we expect you to do next is to do some research and to find sources of inspiration for this project.
Between now and the presentation session at the end of the first week in November, you are to do research into a variety of fields in order to expose yourselves to a many sources of material as possible on the subject of witches and wizards, magical spaces, haunted houses and other related topics.
These sources of inspiration can be drawn from:
- Literature
- Poetry
- Fairy tales
- Painting
- Comic strips
- Sculpture
- Photography
- Theatre
- Film.
- Video games
- Dance, choreography
- Music
- Architecture.
You will each have 30 minutes to present your sources of inspiration in front of a panel of critics.
You can use any media you want: Powerpoint presentation, film, printed images, plans, etc...
These presentations should be lively, creative and fun: they are to form a brainstorming session to be experienced as a group (perhaps followed by a grand “Witches and Wizards’” ritual banquet?) to put us in the mood for this magical project.
At the end of your presentation, you will be expected to announce briefly what you intend to do next, for stage 3 of the programme, in terms of the "device" that you will be making as the first materialization of your ideas.
Submission: Crit presentation
Critics: Colin Fournier, Astrid Dahmen, guest critics.
Date: November 7, 8, 9, 10, 2010 (exact date and time to be determined)
Place: Innsbruck
Presentation format: a) Verbal presentation, with visual aids (see above).
b) PDF document summarizing your research, to be sent by e-mail to Astrid and Colin on 07.11.10. The
title of the file should be your family name followed by your first name followed by “W2: Research”.
Example: “Einstein Albert. W2: Research”
Stage 3. Device.
Following from the precedents that inspire you and which you will have presented for stage 2 of the programme, you are expected to develop a small scale conceptual project based on the themes that you have identified and that embody, in your opinion, the spirit of the witch or wizard, your notion of a magical world of design.
This conceptual project can take many forms. It can be:
- An object, either on a 1 to 1 scale or as a reduced model.
Submission: Crit presentation
· A title for your device· A short text of 200-300 words
The title of the e-mail file should be your family name followed by your first name followed by “W3: Device”.
Stage 4. Field trip.Since you will be coming to London to present your devices and to have a crit at the Bartlett, which will take a whole day, we propose that you should spend two or three more days in London in order to look for possible sites for your design projects.
You should focus your research on the city of London, the banking area known as “the square mile”, the area that used to be, in the Middle Ages, the full extent of London and now has the highest density of surveillance cameras in the whole world.And yet this highly controlled area that is so security conscious is also a mysterious area that is almost completely deserted during the week-end and has a labyrinthine urban texture within which there are many hidden and secretive areas.
Stage 5. Preliminary design
Following the conceptual design of stage 3 and the field trip of stage 4, you will be expected to start working on your preliminary design for the witch / wizard house. This will require firming up your choice of a site and the development of a design programme.
What we are expecting you to submit and present on January 27th, as discussed when we met in London, are the following 6 elements:
1) The "device"
Your last two presentations, both in Innsbruck and in London, included material in a variety of media. You need to document this material in such a way that it can also be summarized in hard copy format. What we expect is:
a) A 3D line drawing (black on white) illustrating the key design of the "device".
Format: A1 landscape.
The 3d line drawing will represent the key principles of your device. Keep in mind that your small scale conceptual project – even if it is a film or performance - is based on the themes that you have identified and that embody, in your opinion, the spirit of the witch or wizard, your notion of a magical world of design.
The line drawing of the device shall represent these ideas. In case of a moving object, the drawing needs to show this movements, e.g. you can overlap various stages by using different line types etc...
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| Example: Benedikt Hörmann |
b) A 100 word description of the "device".
c) For those of you who showed a film or an animation, please submit some key frames that summarize the character of the film. Print these out so that they fit on an A2 sheet.
d) For work that was presented as a "performance", find a way to illustrate it, for example, as a diagram of movement and action.
2) The site
When you were in London, you all started to look at possible sites for your design projects.
For this crit, we expect you to describe your chosen site in three ways:
a) By means of a powerpoint presentation showing views of the site and its broader urban context.
b) By means of a conventional site plan (at a scale of 1/1000, 1/500 or 1/200, depending on the size of your project). Format: A2
c) By means of a more "subjective" drawing, an " unknown territory”, an emotional territory -Kunstlandschaften- drawing, that gives the "spirit" of the site.
„you must orient yourself… not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, [the city] can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing."
Roland Barthes in the Empire of Signs
The interest lies in the orchestration and intensification of the context. Architecture and Urbanism is here understood as „Kunstlandschaften“. In the beginning of each design process lies the analysis of the site and its situation followed by the interpretation of its phenomena and parameters. You need to identify these specific parameters for your own interpretation of the site shown in your „Unknown Territory“.
Seen as operative topographies, the digitalisation and interpreation of the context as an urban landscape plays a major role within the design process.
Format: DIN A1 Landscape
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| Example: Lisa Sommer |
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| Example: Martin Mackowitz |
3) The "client"
Define your client:
a) Male (Wizard) or female (witch).
b) Individual or group (some of you were thinking of a client that may include several characters.
c) Define their personality, history, age, interests, etc... (like a "facebook" social networking profile). Define, in particular, their special attributes and magical "powers".
The above description should be done in written and graphic form. Format: A2
4) The programme.
Having defined the client, define the programme for the "house". It does not have to be a home (although it can be). It can also be a laboratory, an observation post, a meeting place, etc... or all those things, or something else. In any case, you need to define the brief:
a) List of functions.
b) Number, type and size of rooms to meet these functions.
c) Access and circulation requirements.
d) Diagram of "functional" relations between the rooms.
d) Identification of the emotional/architectural effects that are to be reached through the design.
The above description can be done in written and graphic form. Format: A2
5) The Preliminary design
This is a very important phase in your work: you have to present the preliminary design concept of your project.
What is expected is the following:
a) Conceptual diagrams of the proposal.
b) Rough study model showing the mood of the project and its overall volumetric massing. You should also take photos of these models.
c) Set of drawings at a scale of 1/200 or 1/500, depending on the project (to be negotiated with Astrid).
e) 3D computer renders.
Format: A2
6) The Blog.
You are also expected to update your blog to incorporate all the above elements.
Stage 6: Final Design
To be completed.
Book references: (to be completed)
Anthony Vidler: The Architectural uncanny. MIT press. 1992.
Edgar Allen Poe: The fall of the house of Usher.(Available as download on project Gutemberg)
Jane Alison: The surreal house, Yale University Press. 2010 (catalogue of exhibition at the Barbican Centre)
Film References: (to be completed)
Rene clair. I married a witch. 1942
Jean Cocteau: The beauty and the beast.1946
Jacques Tati: Mon Oncle. 1958
Luis Bunuel: The exterminating angel. 1962
