Ephemeral building is an attitude. It isn't just about knowing how long individual components will last. It's also about the fact that we don't know today what will be right tomorrow. It takes a certain attitude to be able to ac­cept this: a certain humility regarding the extent to which one's predictions are circumscribed.

— Werner Sobeck, The New Less Is More, 2009

Field Stations

This course reflects an interest in investigating structures that have the capacity to operate as frames for a myriad of programs or activities. An observatory of sorts, a field station is by definition a post, camp or place intermittently occupied to accommodate activity. Often located in an outlying area or an area where research or a venture is under way.

Ephemeral Building 

The studio will work with lightness as a framework to build and challenge more permanent and static building solutions. Another way of understanding the concept of lightweight in architecture is to think about ephemeral building —everything that minimizes construction material, doesn't weigh much and, therefore, has special properties.

With this concept in mind the studio wants to investigate the full potential of different materials that have a low environmental impact or that are responsive to the environment.

In the studio, lightweight architecture will be explored through the design of a field station that can conceptually disappear without leaving a trace. 

Assembly and Temporality

Understanding the field station as a small open structure that seeks to witness, sample and host recurring activities, we will seek to understand the complexity of a building’s life cycle, trying to anticipate not just how it will be built and used, but also how it will be maintained and disassembled. 

Starting with the building materials, we will try to answer the following questions: How is a given material processed or transformed to become reliable building elements? How do different elements come together to form a structure and how does that particular arrangement relate to its situation? 

Letting your observation studies guide you in the definition of a new programmatic intention for a contemporary observatory, we will take a deeper look into the assembly process to investigate how regional differences can be part of a more technological and active project, defining its capacity to respond to the environment.