The Guest Professor Studio ‘Space & Technique’ offers an advanced master course in architectural design. In the autumn semester 2016 the guest professor in the studio will be Swiss architect Christian Kerez arch ETH, professor at ETHZ, with the architectural practice in Zürich.
http://www.kerez.arch.ethz.ch/
www.kerez.ch
www.christiankerez.tumblr.com

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The studio will operate on the base of two working groups, with12 students in each. The group 1 will be working with an architectural research “Experience of a Nordic Space” where students will be producing pictures and texts on the theme of Nordic Space, but not traditional architectural projects. Christian Kerez will be teaching this group. The group 2 will be working with a kind of research-oriented project proposal with the same theme, based on the set of individually chosen criteria developed in collaboration with the students from the group 1. The division into two groups, a research and a project group, will be done on the base individual portfolios and interviews, conducted during the first semester week. The idea of collaboration aims to strengthen the architectural discussion and synergy between both groups with slightly different architectural focuses. Precise details about the work and how we imagine it to be conducted and presented will be given the students at the beginning of the studio. We hope that this elementary starting point could generate an interesting frame for development of architecturally engaging work in the studio.

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“A building is not like an experiment in science, because the experience of the architectonic space is something you cannot separate from the space itself. The quality of architecture can only be verified within the experience of the building itself. The plan is only a tool, models are only an approach; they cannot replace architectonic space.

I am nonetheless interested in making models, and sketches as pictures and showing them in exhibitions, because by reducing the experience of space they can help to focus on individual aspects of architecture. Every kind of medium translates space into something else that can be put into a book or an exhibition, carried around, or sent by email. This change, this crucial experience of the architectural space can provide an awareness of certain individual aspects of architecture…..”

“…. A sea of pictures from our pages on Facebook, Tumblr, and homepage reflect on singular, fragmented aspects of architecture, on impressions that pass by without any clear statement. Some pictures are merely raw material which may, one day, become a starting point of an idea or just help to clarify a singular question in an ongoing design process…..Other pictures taken on different journeys and shown at lectures try only to memorize and describe the experience of the real, absent architecture. All these pictures show a never-ending field of possibilities for a project, a starting point full of incertitude. Only in a project will these streams of pictures eventually meet and find some evidence hidden in its conceptual logic.”
Christian Kerez;