"The hallucinatory effect derives from the extraordinary clarity and not from mystery or mist. Nothing is more fantastic ultimately than precision."

Alain Robbe-Grillet on Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis

• Introduction

Continuing a series of studios that investigate Universal Architecture, this studio will develop projects which addresses universality through the design of buildings with high degree of specificity and particular requirements. We will delve into the relationship of form and content, creating architecture with an ambition to design and define everything, conceiving the building as a complete world. The task will be to design buildings for the German state apparatus, developing architectural responses to the largest government in Europe. The discussions will center around direct and literal architecture: an architecture of matter-of-fact who´s aims and agency is clear and stated.

Rather than seeking universal qualities in the generic, we will attempt to find those qualities through hyper-specificity. In doing so, we will engage with questions of technology, structure and tectonics in relation to the city and current economic realities´ impact on architecture. We will discuss in what way structure is a carrier of content, addressing questions of construction and civic space within the city.

The studio will begin with the examination of precedents, studying exemplary buildings which are born out of not only specific technical requirements, but unique choreographies of program, space, site and cultural conditions. How in turn those specific buildings achieve unmistakable and transferable qualities will be at the center of discussion in the studio.

• Spaces of Public Management

Participants will work on the design on spaces for the government of Germany in Berlin, one of the largest bureaucracies in Europe. Each student will be asked to define her or his sector, department or even more infrastructural projects related to the state apparatus.

In the design of the building we will work with the industrial process of production to build tailor made industrial products, such as building parts and details. We will then look into contemporary modes of construction, slip casting, 3D printing, CNC milling, other manufacturing technologies. In their projects, students will engage in architectural production through detailed design and crafting of both buildings and books, employing drawing and writing as essential means to produce architecture.

• The City

We will delve into buildings of the city which are neither capricious nor urbane and aim to develop civic architecture which has the ambition synthesizing a public ambition into a whole, forming a space for the collective imagination, precisely not ´iconic´. We will develop projects addressing the public appropriate for the 21st century.

As primitives of the new technological era, we will work from within the discipline of architecture harboring both an understanding of architecture as an ancient discipline and a fascination for the new world, developing an architecture which serves as landing strips for dust, motes, light and shadow.