A biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals.
CONTENT / This year again we start making emphasis on the many changes that are shaking the architecture profession. More specifically, this time the introduction of non-human conditions in the process of design is needed to preserve the theory of the Earth as an organism – see Gaia hypothesis.
In this first semester, our course has students from more than twenty different nationalities. This is a strength of our learning, and we want to proceed with that singularity:
Every student needs to study and measure a biotope from her/his country, city, or town. A piece of landscape to understand the environment and the rules of the relations between plants and animals, including people.
AIMS / Our aim is to be capable of measuring an activity in a specific landscape and to do it we will have to design our measuring tools.
After identifying a local biotope, we will work with the measurements and descriptions of the place.
- Find opportunities in our environments to start with a project.
- Introduce yourself to the class.
- Get to know the rest of the future members of your working group.
- Learn how to contribute to group work.
METHOD /
1st working day: Introduce your biotope presenting a 1 min video with the values of your singular environment.
Group work according to your common interests. Connect the activities of your biotopes in a story board (free technique).
2nd day: Final crit. Design your instruments of measuring aspects of live in your group selected biotope.
SCHEDULE / 2-Week Workshop. Weekly 4-hour class arranged with the students:
Introduction / 16 Sept 2022.
Video + Story board / 23 Sept 2022.
Final Crit / 30 Sept 2022.
EVALUATION / Develop the answers to 3 questions from these 12:
- The WORKSHOP proposes that students begin to build a complete thought to tackle projects, to process, organize, view and display information so that “data collection” became proactive rather than an analytical tool. Have I been able to go beyond analysis procedure and convert the project into a proposition display?
- The students have to learn to criticize their work and to draw conclusions. They have to process systems and models of architectural production, reformulating nonobvious descriptions, focusing their gaze on the invisible structures, not having preconceived ideas, producing unexpected findings, and non-discursive reasoning. Have I used my own ways of expression reformulating descriptions and avoiding the obvious and the use of direct images of the project culture?
- The student begins to explore architectural expression systems to formalize their projective ideas. How many ways of expression have I used at work and what is the value expressed by each of them?
- We have to learn to talk and discuss about architectural sustainability criteria, adding the concept of ecological niche project (mental territory, social, material, technical, medium-environmental, etc). Have I addressed the theme of THE WORKSHOP responding to the proposal on the sustainability?
- We are going to know how to work in-group to discover the roles in production systems. How much information data made in-group have I used to express my project?
- The students must participate and contribute with their ideas to the class as an essential part of knowledge. What is the intensity used to express my ideas through the architectural expression ways?
- The students must learn to establish a personal lexicon to express his architectural ideas. Have you expressed your ideas through a personal lexicon, or have you imitated expression systems used by other designers seen in the media (magazines or Internet)?
- You need positively assess risk and innovation as a necessary condition of design. Innovation defined as the use of allied disciplines to develop intellectual and technical tools to create new realities, within their own reality, exceeding the established models. Do I use allied disciplines for innovative production?
- The students must enter, step by step, work details the project culture, you must learn to interpret and criticize from their own proposal. How many data have you appropriated from the culture to express my project?
- You should produce an open system work, with more questions than answers. How many questions have you made throughout the design process and how many have you tried to answer?
- Skills: Interest in the contribution, regardless of the attitude from which it was generated. What is the interest of my contribution?
- Attitudes: how to tackle the problem independent of the outcome. Have I solved with intellectual and material effort to present the proposal?
Bibliography / The work by Thomas Thwaites and Philippe Rahm
Alicante University (SPAIN) /
Joaquín Alvado Bañón (joaquin.alvado@ua.es)
Javier Sánchez Merina (jsm@ua.es)