Master studio Space and Technique is concerned with exploring ideas about architectural space and different techniques of making these ideas possible as beautiful and real experiences of everyday architecture.

www.romogteknikk.aho.no

The main goal of this studio is to produce architecture where form and space are based on the student’s understanding of architecture and life and his/her desire to implement it in the project. We call the representations of these processes which intentionally contain both physical, intellectual and emotional ‘manipulation’ of the world around us - the architectural proposal. The guest professor in the studio will be Swiss architect Pascal Flammer.

http://www.pascalflammer.com

The design work in the studio during the semester will be focused on three parts:

1/Self-reflection

The first phase is self-reflective and without any direct consideration of architectural form and space. The student will be asked to define what his/her fundamental interests and views are and then understand, rationalize and describe his/her motivations and fascinations. The process will be an analysis of ideas, experiences, knowledge, etc., revealing the aspects of personal significance in the questions which are universally relevant. But in addition, certain themes, that we, teachers are interested to explore at the moment, will be introduced. The given themes will be: FRAGMENTED ENTITIES, MIXING OF SEEMINGLY UNFITTING THINGS and the renewed notion of COLLAGE, COLORS, may be MIRRORS and some others.  The more explicit and inclusive the distilled “analysis” in this phase, the more effective it will serve as a guiding principle for the second phase: the manifestation of form.

2/Manifestation of Form

The abstract and formless self-reflection is transformed into a mental, a physical and emotional manifestation of the most holistic and feasible form and space possible.

Site, size, typology, function (chosen by students), construction, material and space will be thematically developed according to the guidelines of self-reflection. The goal is maximizing the intensity of proposed architecture, through the virtuosity, clarity and elegance of student’s intention. The full exploration and development of architectural elements, but also architectonic tools will be employed. In that work, we will focus on two notions: on creating an architecture of contradiction and interactiveness.

3/Representation

The transformation from self-reflection to form and space exists only in the author’s mind and remains as yet undefined in many aspects. Through the representation process, the students will design elements of mental form physically concrete, hierarchically ordered, proportioned, well-structured, etc, in order to clarify and communicate their thoughts and intentions to the others. The aim is to single out the ideal, most effective representational instrument, related to the becoming project. By means of a “language” of the project, the process will find its final form and space, and that’s what we will call “an architectural proposal”.

These three steps are of course non-linear, they are largely iterative and fragmentary. Nevertheless, your architectural proposal should be highly consistent. A good proposal should loosen from the hermetic of the authorship and the creative process by which it emerged., and therefore become universal.  

Teaching assistants: Aleksandra Ognjanov, Chris Engh