Start semester
80 317 Collecting Architecture: Warburg Models
Credits:
6
Full course name in Norwegian Bokmål:
Collecting Architecture: Warburg Models
Course code:
80 317
Level of study:
Master
Teaching semester:
2020 Autumn
Assessment semester:
2020 Autumn
Language of instruction:
English
Maximum number of students:
Collecting Architecture: Warburg Models
Person in charge
Mari Lending
Tim Ainsworth Anstey
Required prerequisite knowledge
This is a course that is useful for pre-diploma students planning thesis work and for students who want to understand about research. It is open for students from all institutes but the primary focus is on architectural model making. Students must possess excellent architectural drawing skills. Students must be able to read English fluently.
Course content
The elective forms part of a project to produce an exhibition, to be displayed in London in autumn 2022, that explains the building history of one important cultural institution, the Warburg Institute, which is part of the University of London.
The Warburg Institute is a research library that contains a collection of books about cultural memory. Between 1923 and 1958 the Institute commissioned six architectural projects that all tied ideas about architecture to ideas about classifying knowledge. In them, architectural organisation in plan and section reflected the categorical organisation of the contents. The Warburg Models exhibition will display and explain these relationships through commissioning one architectural model for each of these projects. The work of the elective is to design the models
Participants:
The Warburg Institute currently occupies a building from 1958, which will undergo a complete renovation, and spatial reorganisation, over the next three years, designed by the UK architects Haworth Tompkins (for a description of the architects see https://www.haworthtompkins.com/). Both the Warburg Institute and Haworth Tomkins Architects will participate in the elective course, and a model for this rebuilding forms the final exhibit in the exhibition
If you want to see more of the visual material and hear more of the story that the exhibition will tell, go to https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2019/11/tim-anstey-the-tenants-furniture-re-inscribing-the-warburg-institute/?fbclid=IwAR199IGKod8gaRxlQKD_5G5Sk2_hDWFh04T0neGDEJ07m1ROaRxA60Ge4lo
Learning outcome
After this course the student will have:
- Practiced conceptual thinking about the communicative potential of architectural models
- Learnt research techniques based on using archival information
- Developed precise writing techniques to caption an exhibition display
- Developed ideas about cultural memory and the transfer of tradition
- Demonstrated how the knowledge they already have in using drawing as a means to analysis architectural situations can be applied to historical material in order to produce vibrant new design propositions.
Working and learning activities
Student Activities:
Students in the elective will take one out of the architectural projects commissioned by the Warburg Institute and research it using archive material. This research will be contextualised by seminars that provide an account of the cultural history surrounding the Institute (including the political circumstances that led to its move from Hamburg to London in 1933 and the development of visual culture between Britain and Europe later in the 20th century). From this research students will develop designs for an architectural model of the building chosen, build a prototype of that model and write a short text (400 words) that can act as a catalogue entry relating to the object.
| Form of assessment | Grouping | Grading scale | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project assignment | Individual | Pass / fail |