Lecturers:
Prof. Dr. Vera Bühlmann
Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, PHD Candidate ATTP
& Guests
The Very Many and the Big Plenty:
Quantity and the Precious
Digital Fabrication, Smart Cities, Internet of Things, Big Data, Rationalisation and the Digital Production Chain, semantic or object-oriented ontologies, parametricism as "the New International Style": Today, all tends to be interlinked and networked. Graphs afford us an overview. Diagrams incorporate entire typologies. Architects can find thousands of floor plans in the web, programs provide templates and libraries with schemata for solving any kind of problem. Also in architecture, we are being flooded with "information" - information that is, proportional to the extent and accessibility of this information, less and less meaningful. Stripped to the quantitative, such information is less and less capable of making sense.
This lecture course introduces students to contemporary challenges in architecture, and it provides a spectrum of manners of dealing with them. We invite international studios to present their work, to discuss these challenges, and to report on their strategies of encountering them. It is meant as helping hand for young architects to care, profile and develop their discipline and their mastership within the The Very Many and the Big Plenty which we face today, and which others have exposed as The End of Quality as a Matter of Fact (Archizoom).
Together with all that may change in architecture: it remains invariant that architecture evolves and develops through treating things quantitatively. Architecture counts things, weighs them, discretises and measures them, it brings elements into constellations, articulates processes in plans, drawings, programs and algorithms, it designs those constellations in their manner of fitting and relating. Thereby, architecture always accounts, recounts, narrates. It demonstrates and draws together, it records and expresses, it manifests something that can be interiorised and remembered. Architecture creates places and organises spaces that are inhabited and animated.
Nothing is perhaps more challenging for architects – today as any time before – than the apparently pauciloquent talk on pure quantities. For qualities there often remains only vague, dazzling and iridescent words, words which all too often are stripped of their proper weight vis a vis the graspable, measurable, and objective aspects of architecture. How can we learn to have confidence in qualities in the light of the quantitative?
PROVISIONAL PROGRAM
Mo 11:00-13:00 pm in AUDI MAX
8 October 2018––––––––Contemporary? Architecture? // Introductory lecture by Vera Bühlmann ATTP TU WIEN, with Visiting Professor Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University NY USA
15 October 2018––––––––Architecture Exhibitions // Lecture by Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, ATTP TU WIEN
22 October 2018––––––––NN // Lecture by Vera Bühlmann, ATTP TU WIEN
29 October 2018––––––––Studio Encounter, Philipp Morel, EZCT
5 November 2018––––––––Digitaler Atlas für Architekten: das Können mit dem Vielen // Lecture by Ludger Hovestadt, ETH Zurich
12 November 2018––––––––NO COURSE
19 November 2018––––––––NN to be announced shortly
26 November 2018––––––––Xenotheca // Lectures by Diana Alvarez-Marin und Miro Roman, ETH Zurich
3 December 2018––––––––Studio Encounter // 300 000 km/s
10 December 2018––––––––Architectonic Objects // Lecture by Vera Bühlmann, ATTP TU Wien
17 December 2018––––––––Studio Encounter // WAI THINK TANK
11 January 2019––––––––EXAM (upload via TUWEL, open until fri 11/jan/19 23:59)
- Mandatory Presence in the Lecture Course
- Written exam (no Multiple Choice): A Short text on "Stairs / Stiege as an Architectonic Object", as well as Short Reports on the Studio Encounters
Short Reports on the Studio Encounters: write a few sentences on each studio encounter, responding to (1) what were the studio’s topics, (2) was there a project that you remember particularly well, which one and what was it about, (3) did you find the manner in how they practice architecture surprising and interesting, and how so (or not so)?
You can hand in your Stairs Story and Reports via Tuwel (see Link above)
and find the respective upload time frames there.
You need to be registered to the course/VO to do that - do not forget to enroll during the time frame.
