METHOD To understand traditional Architectural elements used in creating environmentally comfortable and healthy buildings. To be able to design new elements inspired by traditional ones TECHNIQUE -A model of the designed element. -A story board (shop drawings are recommended) -2min analysis presentation video. AIMS The importance of traditional and vernacular architectural heritage and …
Category Archives: ARCH
EPHEMERAL ARCHITECTURE: URBAN FOLLIES
METHOD Interpreting Public Place and Local Heritage; designing small ephemeral architectural structure for the Cultural Capital of Culture 2027 TECHNIQUE Students will be paired with international colleagues: select an historic urban space in Évora and propose an urban device to enable people (locals, visitors, etc.) to enjoy that place. AIMS Raise awareness about …
SITE WORKS: THINKING THROUGH DRAWING
METHOD Evolving the site drawing as a tool to think through. TECHNIQUE Evolving drawing techniques using your choice of medium in relation to site interests and project concerns. AIMS To explore the capacity of drawing as a means of extending cognition. STRENGTHS Evolving tools to investigate a site. TEACHING DAY AND HOURS Fridays 09.00-13.00 CET …
BIOTOPES v2 COMPETITION
A biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals. Last semester we did a workshop related to biotopes. This year we will start with this information and we will revise the concept of Biotope using the work developed by the students as a …
VENICE IN THE METAVERSO v2
CONTENT / what it is relevant on Architecture nowadays is talking about SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION. Last year we designed in the Metaverso in Venice to create new environments, relations and horizons. The proposal for the workshop is to create a sustainable space with agents and objects in order to redesign the project developed last year …
ARCH: Coastline Window
As a tribute to our coastline … CONTENT / We know, now, that the rising waters could reach about 90 centimeters. This information should change our way to design the architectural project in this area. Above all, it is a question of letting the site guide the project rather than thinking of the architectural object …
ARCH: Visual Storytelling – Interaction with Architecture through Photography
CONTENT / This workshop is a spiritual and thematic continuation of ‘Texture, Rhythm, Pattern’ from the fall semester. Students once again use their photo cameras to capture their personal interpretation of human interaction with the architectural environment, and the potentials in visual storytelling through still images. AIMS & METHOD / In a similar …
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ARCH: Drawing Spatial Movement
CONTENT / Movement is fundamental to our experience of the spaces we inhabit, but design can fail to fully engage with this simple truth. Our representational traditions seem caught in ambitions for static portrayal, capturing our world as frozen moments in a seeming denial of time. So, when we begin designing the drawing tools we turn …
ARCH: re: cultivation
CONTENT / The urban fabric is interwoven with specific places such as urban gardens, parks, river banks, semi-public or semi-private green areas. Those little lungs of the cities, often play a role of informal gathering spots, where inhabitants can undertake various activities from picnics and barbecues, through sports, yoga, leisure up to everyday walks with …
ARCH: the space for learning as a landscape of desire
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. …
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ARCH: Emergency Architecture
METHOD / Research the problem, fast design of the architectural solution. TECHNIQUE / Collage, sketches, drawings, visualisation, physical model. AIMS / To research and design an emergency architecture in chosen context. STRENGTHS / Understanding the need for a shelter in different emergency contexts and situations (refugee, natural disasters, homeless). Creating a possible scenarios and solution. Wroclaw University of Science …
ARCH: Texture, Rhythm, Pattern.
METHOD Understanding the historical dynamics and characteristic features of the urban built heritage and the interaction with its dwellers in the process of developing a personal interpretation of the city through the eye of the camera. TECHNIQUE Students will use their camera in the exploration of urban patterns, textures, visual rhythm, contrasts, contextual interrelations and …
ARCH: Machinery Landscapes
METHOD Search for machine aesthetics as a system, create an imaginary landscape based on machinery and make a collective landscape. TECHNIQUE A collective landscape based on machinery will be produced by drawings and collages. AIMS To encourage to look at architecture from another perspective, to enhance critical and relational thinking, to empower collective work. STRENGTHS …
ARCH: Reuse / Retake – Democratic Architecture
METHOD Reinterpreting the notion of architecture through reuse of existing buildings and areas. TECHNIQUE Through exploration of existing and underused buildings and areas in the city we would like to discover new infinite places reinterpreting the notion of commons in the EU cities. AIMS To reflect on the role of the architecture and explore new …
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ARCH: Discovering place through unfamiliar language
METHOD Storytelling – interpreting place through imagination and language. TECHNIQUE Through using the rhythm, tone and intonation of language explain and question place in words from language(s) you are not familiar with. AIMS To use languages and words that students are not familiar with to create a story that helps a listener to read a place, even if that listener does not ‘speak’ the language. …
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ARCH: Psychoanalysis of creativity 3 Path to the library
METHOD Analyses & Self-reflection on different creativity styles. Based on 3 frameworks of design. 3 pre-recorded lectures about theory of creativity and workshops will be given as base for the exercise. TECHNIQUE First week will be desiccated to production of fast ideas, drawings/sketches based on theory and workshops. Second week will be dedicated to refine …
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ARCH: treatment
METHOD Students will work around the possibility of transforming urban space and its perception and imagining the shape of the public space. TECHNIQUE All techniques of urban project are allowed. AIMS regenerating / redeveloping the undecided or degraded spaces of the historic city. STRENGTHS Students and teachers from different cultural areas of the project disciplines …
ARCH: graphic anthropology
METHOD Use drawing as a tool to understand the experiences of people in place. TECHNIQUE Build a relationship with a participant in the neighbourhood you are studying and make a series of drawings of their experiences/stories/histories. AIMS To challenge the generic idea of ‘the user’ by understanding the nuanced and complex experiences of people in …
ARCH: before me, the deluge
METHOD Identify and analyse the topographic condition you would like to work with in response to the brief (eg: land that becomes an island, land/water edge, open water). TECHNIQUE Through models, physical and digital, develop ways of dealing with unpredictable water levels to propose a structure for shelter, be it attached to land and responsive …
ARCH: cognitive mapping
METHOD Mappings (hybrid drawings). TECHNIQUE Through models, physical and digital, develop ways of dealing with unpredictable water levels to propose a structure for shelter, be it attached to land and responsive or amphibious or buoyant… AIMS To appreciate cognitive mapping as a tool that assigns preferences, determines attitudes and predicts possibilities. STRENGTHS To transcend the …
ARCH: competition / research: MATTER ON LINES. MARBLE
CONTENT / What it is relevant on Architecture and Art, talking about objects is the matter. Matter as a physical substance that create atmospheres, relations and light. The proposal for the workshop is to create matter with lines in order to design a “Material City”. As a second attempt for this workshop, using the definition of …
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ARCH: architectural cornerstones
CONTENT / The corner plays a very special role in any architectural scale. From the micro to the macro. It is the boundary of architectural spaces, both inside and outside. Corners define places and transitions; they mark beginnings and ends. Corners are the exceptions of any rule. However, the corner has, for a long time …
ARCH: spatial agency: a detail
CONTENT / Architectural details are often seen or even reduced to tools for solving technical issues and other things related to construction. Or they are described in relation to architectural styles. But what happens when we look at the detail and use the detail as a form of spatial agency? Agency has to do with …
ARCH: inside outside – contaminating architecture and landscape
CONTENT / Today, architecture, public spaces, gardens and landscapes are experiencing moments of contamination like never before seen in the history of these disciplines. Probably, during the Renaissance and soon after, major projects such as Versailles brought together the disciplines of architecture and landscape, creating physical connections and visual relationships between garden spaces and the …
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ARCH: working with the existent and the non-existent
CONTENT / Everyone has a favourite architect and artist and we would like to live two days and at least a night in one of the designed dwellings in an urban context by her or him. In this case we can understand the spaces of the house in the phenomenological way and know how it …
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ARCH: housing Europe – challenging sameness
CONTENT Housing forms the rooms, neighborhoods and cityscapes of our everyday lives. Housing is where our most personal happiness and societal well-being originate and find their expression. Simultaneously housing illustrates personal dramas and social ills. The Question of Housing (referring to Engels, Friedrich: Zur Wohnungsfrage. Leipzig, 1872) is increasingly reduced to the phenomena of the …
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ARCH: rivers – ecological, economic, cultural & ideological links between faraway lands – living connectors.
CONTENT / Once hugely determinant in the development of shoreside urban areas, the evolution of city structure, and vital in the survival of the local communities, the role and hence the appreciation of urban riverfronts largely diminished, somewhere in the last century. With the development of infrastructure and the general social and economic transformations, rivers …
ARCH: sharing the voids. reuse and reactivation in architecture
CONTENT / In his book Construire autrement in 2006, the builders, architect, artist, planner (…) Patrick Bouchain reflects on alternative way of building societies: “I believe in temporariness and mobility of things, in exchange. And I work in order to create, in architecture, a situation in which construction could be achieved in another way and …
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ARCH: the ‘review of reviews’
CONTENT This workshop is for students who want to overcome a worry about presenting design work It is deliberately designed to be relaxed and to build confidence The architectural review is ritual in education in which the student presents work to academics in public for legitimisation but which research has shown to be a frightening …
ARCH + ARTS: competition / research: MATTER ON LINES. MARBLE
CONTENT / What it is relevant on Architecture and Art, talking about objects is the matter. Matter as a physical substance that create atmospheres, relations and light. The proposal for the workshop is to create matter with lines. MARBLE IS A HARD ROCK THAT HAS A PATTERN OF LINES GOING THROUGH IT THAT CAN BE …
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ARCH: pop up
CONTENT / In the Cambridge Dictionary “to pop-up” means to appear or happen, especially suddenly or unexpectedly. This word is also used to describe a shop, restaurant, etc. that operates temporarily and only for a short period when it is likely to get a lot of customers. Similarly, like a three-dimensional folding object that suddenly …
ARCH: homeland miniatures: a collective digital travelbook
CONTENT / In architectural education, one of the most common and universal representation technique is central perspective which was discovered during Renaissance period. The rational world that Renaissance offered us helps to create a universal language in the field of architecture and enables to represent our thoughts on space so as to create a dialog …
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ARCH: evolution of forgotten – ignored wisdoms
CONTENT / The rapid developments of the urban realms and the monstrous evolution of the socioeconomic systems together with the invading globalization deprived the people from the sustainable way of living which was forged by local conditions through the centuries. The workshop will revisit existing, forgotten or lost worlds and traditions or vernacular architecture not …
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ARCH: ephemeral architecture: urban follies
CONTENT / We live in a time of change. What we took for granted in the summer of 2019 is now an enormous uncertainty. Each day we sick for answers to questions such as when can we travel? When can we visit a museum? And I ask how can I introduce students, here and worldwide, …
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ARCH: psychoanalysis of the design process – three paths to a library
CONTENT / The science on various design methods and processes is a fascinating branch of knowledge which architects perhaps do not study enough. The knowledge of design methods could organise and systematise your work, offer an X-ray vision, real psychanalysis of yourself as well as other designers and your tutors. This science may also help …
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ARCH: architectural narrative – event
„Dancing and architecture are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.” Havelock …
ARCH: permissive city
CONTENT / In many cities, globalisation has contributed to the emergence of new urban environments which, over very short periods of time, have replicated similar and homogenous spaces, evacuated public ownership, erased local singularities and produced what may be defined as a generic and franchised city. Most of these cities retain urban environments developed on …
ARCH: treatment
CONTENT / In many different ways, European cities have suffered a common fate: the compulsive increase in buildings, the financialization of the real estate market, the enslavement of urban space to cars. Despite the diversity of individual national events, these are the distinctive traits of the contemporary city that have left on the ground portions …
ARCH+ARTS: the space for learning as a landscape of life
CONTENT / Many changes have been in the architecture profession since Journey to the East was written: A 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 a number of cities in Southeast Europe. Later, the acquired disciplinary knowledge …
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ARCH: discover nature in our buildings – enclosed nature and the city
CONTENT / The pandemic period offered us a chance of seeing a deserted city. Empty streets, empty squares (piazzas), empty parks, empty churches, empty theatres, empty museums, all of these created a non-living city. We know that a city does not operate in this way. The city and, at a micro scale, a building live through spaces and …
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ARCH: architecture through language – a play for radio in one act
CONTENT / The architect is a storyteller. The architect designs spaces that speak to the user and, in turn, the user hears that story through an interaction with a building. What would architecture be without a story? We suggest it would not be architecture. But to tell a story we need a language in which …
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ARCH: elements of architecture for the confinement
CONTENT / The COVID-19 crisis has obliged us to rethink the evolution of our models of architecture, our squares and streets, our homes and other typologies of buildings. Our entire cities are being judged due to new relationships within society. Under these novel circumstances we have listened to more experts from different disciplines to give their opinions about …
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ARCH: cognitive mapping
CONTENT / The process of mapping extends and enriches our interaction with the specific conditions of site, therefore it allows the reader to understand and experience the unique characteristics of a specific place. In his article “The Agency of Mapping, Speculation, Critique & Invention”, James Cornertalks of the map as having the power to ‘Reformulate what already …
ARCH: architecture as the art of building communities
CONTENT / In 1982 the English-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine, opened his lecture reflecting on the definition of Architecture as the Art of Building Communities. Thirty-four years later the Urban age Conference held in 2016 in Venice opened up a series of reflections inviting experts from all over the globe, sharing ideas on the future of our cities. What …
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ARCH: architecture & food – an international buffet
CONTENT / Architecture, open and expansive in nature, has explored unlikely interactions and projected hybrids with unpredictable results. Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has defined it as bigamy; Take multiple elements that apparently don’t fit together and merge them to create a new creation or genre. This is a positioning that will allow us to get out of the …
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