2024 Høst

The courses that make up the Subject Matter series are intended to explore what it means to use materials in architecture today, in a time we call the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch where human activities are understood to significantly impact Earth's ecosystems.

Ecosystem thinking suggests that materials are not fixed entities, but rather flows that have histories. When we extract materials for use in architecture, we interact with these histories and change them. In this way, the construction of architecture is intertwined with the ecosystems from which it is extracted.

For millennia, stone was the material of choice for buildings meant to last. While its use required a commitment with respect to its cost, it repaid this investment in durability and stability. But the use of stone in building fell out of fashion in the early 20th Century with the rise of reinforced concrete — itself just a stone crushed and fired: a sort of stone goop.

While concrete offers great formal freedom, its many stages of manufacture and placement distances it from its origins in the earth, producing a great deal of carbon emissions in the process. Stone, on the other hand, remains closer to the ground. With effective and minimal processing, it represents an intriguing environmental calculus, especially in contrast with materials such as concrete, brick, or metals, but also with respect to wood, whose environmental consequences are increasingly complicated.

Recently, there has been an upswing in the interest in stone building in Europe, both for these environmental concerns but also for the humanistic and aesthetic pursuit of an architecture of some nobility. In England, France, Switzerland and Spain, research into the use of massive and load bearing stone has made significant advances. This course seeks to contribute to this ongoing discussion by studying the design of a prototype contemporary stone building.

The course will include a study of a selection of 20th Century architects whose work in stone can inform our investigation. These include the work of Pol Abraham, who rebuilt the center of Orléans in the aftermath of the Second World War with stone prefabrication, Fernand Pouillon’s system of pre-cut stone that allowed him to build very rapidly in both Paris and Algiers, or the theory of Rudolf Schwarz, whose 1949 book Von bebauing der Erde (or ‘On Building the Earth’) describes architecture as a continuous process of extraction and construction, in which human history and the physical landscape are in a constant state of mutual transformation.

This research is in the service of an architectural proposal for a prototype stone building. Working with architectural elements such as wall, window, lintel, entry, stair, and courtyard, students will be asked to develop a proposal for the use of load bearing stone in building today.

The studio relies on the basic tools of architectural thinking: drawing and model making. We avoid using the screen to present and discuss work, infinitely preferring the presence of the physical model and the hard printed line.

The course objectives are to learn principles of wicked problems and tools that have been designed for them. The stronger focus will be on the Mess Mapping tool created by a Stanford emeritus researcher Horn (Horn & Weber, 2007). Wicked problems are complex problems such as unemployment, immigration, childhood obesity, sustainability to name a few (Suoheimo et al., 2020). Design tools to address wicked problems are limited (Suoheimo, 2016; 2019), however, Mess Mapping in one of them. This is a central tool of the course that will capacitate students to grapple what different complexities in service design. The aim of the course is for students to learn Mess Mapping and how to apply the approach to service design projects. Together with learning the basics of Mess Mapping students will also consider, via Service Blueprints (or other tools), how the macro level understanding could be brought down to micro and meso levels of services. Students will create and design recommendations on what to consider when making a service blueprint. These recommendations could be designed in a form of a leaflet, video or any other creative way that are contextually relevant in a specific case. There will be discussion and reflection on whether blueprint is the best tool for conveying findings during mess mapping or for context, or if indeed other service design tools could be used to take the macro level down to the service level.

The aim of the course is for students to learn how the mess mapping tool will aid in understanding the macro level of the service design problems that can be wicked, political, involve multiple stakeholders, have several policies and laws that need to be considered. The tool will aid in understanding the root causes, causalities, and interconnectedness of the wicked problems in question, and in turn aid in the dialogue and understanding of the stakeholders that share the challenges or problems in common.

During the mapping sessions, students will learn facilitation skills and how to listen and give space for people to talk and participate. In the end students will learn synthesizing and questioning the complexity in question and understand what possible domino effects an intervention in the system may cause. It will require students to learn to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, not knowing what the end result or deliverables will be but to trust in the process. It is essential to understand that wicked problems have taken decades if not centuries to form and for this reason might need longer timeframes than current service design practice to unmake them or better mitigate the challenge. For this reason, we will touch on ‘transition design’ principles.

With the course being short, we will only make a partial Mess Map, but this will allow for an understanding of the principles of Mess Mapping. Students will create recommendations on how the information gathered could be transferred into practice via Service Blueprinting (or other tool, if found to be more appropriate for the case) in a real context. Students will also learn skills of working in groups and running a design project in a complex context.

The course will consist of group work, where the mapping tool will be experimented with together with external stakeholders (if possible). There will be reading assignments and each student will write a learning diary of the activities they learn during the course.

The diploma semester at AHO is an independent research and design task on a theme chosen by the student. In consultation with a supervisor, the student is to produce a complete work of exceptional quality contributing to the discipline’s discourse.

The pre-diploma at AHO is an independent research task on a theme chosen by the student. In consultation with the course teacher the student is to produce a written and illustrated report that details a topic to be studied, an approach or methodology, a spatial programme and a plan of work. This report is the foundation of the diploma work.