CONTENT / We started last academic course saying that many changes have been in the architecture profession since Journey to the East was written: the diary of Le Corbusier’s trip in 1911. This book is a collection of visual notations or impressions perceived by Le Corbusier as a visitor to several cities in Southeast Europe. Later, the acquired disciplinary knowledge acted as an inspiration for his architecture.
Our aim last year was to travel to an unknown part of the city with the task to practice an activity to learn from the local, its technology, culture, and society. It was an experience to empathize Architecture as a Comparative Study, learning as a trip, a journey as an experience.
We start this course realizing that many changes have also occurred since last year. Let’s focus in just this important fact: no one is capable to predict the future.
Our workshop takes this uncertainty as an opportunity to imagine new realities and, why not, coexisting at the same time.
This time we will discuss and go further with our proposals and designs for our desired trips, redefining the limits of architecture by experiences to build up research.
AIMS / To identify a desired experience. To work with the imagination and describe a place for your experience. To find opportunities in your desires to start with a project. To introduce oneself to the class. To get to know the rest of the future members of your working group. To learn how to contribute to group work.
METHOD / The student’s desires as building material. To introduce our personal skills and portfolio into a place. Trip to a new destiny you desire to create.
1st day: Introduce yourself presenting a 3min video with the values of your experiences in the desired reality.
2nd day: Group work according to your common interests. Connect your realities in a story board (free technique).
3rd day: Final crit. Design your Zoom setting. Mock-up scale 1:1.
SCHEDULE / 2-Week Workshop. Weekly 4-hour class arranged with the students:
Introduction / 01 Feb 2022.
Video of experience / 04 Feb 2022.
Group story board / 08 Feb 2022
Final Crit / 11 Feb 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 / Le Corbusier. Journey to the East. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Alicante University (SPAIN) /
Joaquín Alvado Bañón (joaquin.alvado@ua.es)
Javier Sánchez Merina (jsm@ua.es)