ARC 694
This semester’s studio work will concern itself with a purposeful inquiry into ideas of duality and integration in various forms, contexts, and scales while being focused on the complex foundational aspects of design and architecture. Through a series of projects, lectures, and readings the body and mind alongside psyche/soul will play central roles in your investigations and intentions for making. Hence, building form and assembly will be examined through a series of analyses, typological precedents, programmatic organization, and formal composition of individual and multi-unit spaces. Some of the concerns in the generation and creation of form, outside of the conventions of space and geometry, will include the psychological, temporal, kinesthetic, sensual, social, and cultural considerations. Introspection and reflection will be both the subject of and method for design.
Foundational issues of publicity and privacy, boundary, threshold and bodily sensation, and spatial phenomena will be studied and employed. For example, we will address access and confinement or the explicit or implied ability to cross a physical or notional boundary. We’ll address separation, or a physical or conceptual boundary between elements that emphasize their differences. All of this in the pursuit of degrees of intimacy understood as a property or value used to calibrate spatial zones and their thresholds---from a public space to a private one, to a two-person shared room to a common room to the street or from a place of greater confinement to less. The experiential and the physical married to the psychological and social will be explored throughout.
With this in mind, several concerns found in psychology will be examined and explored for their possible meaning in architecture. These will include but are not limited to the notion of latency and vibrancy, and chaos and order, and interiority and exteriority, and empathy. Each can be thought of as having an obvious or inherent duality which we will study and apply to architectural process and design understanding for all projects throughout the semester.