Combinatory Bodies

ARCH3010 - Third Year Design Studio

Kent State CAED

Fall 2017

The premise of the studio is based on the collusion between objects and images in the production of architectural form. Rather than use program to determine architectural form the studio poses the problem of how might new forms organize the program and maybe even augment it? The studio will interrogate the potential of medium specific appearance-making in architecture and differentiating between realism as a representational mode through the extraction of abstracted information of selected objects that we will study.

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Through the design of the studio project we will examine the ways in which architecture can engage with reality/realism without succumbing to the pictorial resemblance spawned by the renaissance (naive realism). One current response to this is the return to orthographic projection and platonic primitives. Basically, this could be seen as a rejection of the real and a reaffirmation of abstraction, process and rationality. Perhaps this response is not so much a rejection as it is an indifference towards the real.

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The vehicle for this is a digital library & archive as well as mediascape. One of the interesting things about the project brief is that it deals with not only the design of the archive but also the ground and immediate surrounding site in the form of a mediascape.

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MEDIASCAPE

Contemporary media enables unprecedented immediacy. Advancements in technology and available devices continually evolve how we exchange information and disseminate knowledge. Not only has this development altered our conception of what constitutes public, it has also enabled unparalleled opportunity for access. Within the context of the studio you should consider the provocative potentials of media, both digital and physical, to influence a long-term recalibration of consciousness. Scape suggests something more extensive and less explicit in its boundary. A scape can be either picturesque or structured, realizing an organic inclusion of parts or enveloping a deployment of objects. One recent example merging square and scape is James Corner Field Operations’ Cleveland Public Square, which sought to revive a lifeless fragmentation into a unified whole. Within the parameters of the project and site, the proposed mediascape hopes to embrace a local yet worldly vision of a unified agenda in aesthetic culture. 

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Media plays an important role in the production of form and design here. The varying methods of producing visual, audio and other forms of media are explored through the series of spaces to be designed in the ‘mediascape’.

Throughout the studio we will examine the role of the graphic in architectural representation. The studio discusses the relationships between graphic projections and their implications when dealing with surface and sculpted volumes. Ideas about graphics, color, form and figure and their visual effects are central to the work.

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DIGITAL LIBRARY/MEDIATHEQUE

The library should be able to re-invent itself programmatically by introducing new ways and incorporating digital technology into its already existing ways and methods of learning. You should incorporate various other media (audio visual, 3D) apart from books and print media to make it a prospect for the future. The spatiality of the library should be re-interpreted from typical and pragmatic interiors to innovative and flexible typology of reading spaces and interior arrangements.

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Throughout the studio we examined the role of the graphic in architectural representation. The studio discusses the relationships between graphic projections and their implications when dealing with surface and sculpted volumes. Ideas about graphics, color, form and figure and their visual effects are central to the work and are explored through methods of projection and mapping in order to understand the role of the graphic in distorting and flattening perspective.