This studio will allow students to acquire a novel approach to addressing building types, develop their own sense of what constitutes the typicality of a building and to be able to articulate this sense in capturing the qualities of a typicality that cannot “properly” be named.  In doing this, students will work iteratively with both words and images in formulating their own stance towards the essential and invariant qualities of a building type, what makes a building same, other and odder in relationship to all the other buildings of its type.  In designing a particular building type for a site situated in Vienna, students will learn to apply this stance in the design process and in the graphic articulation of their final presentation boards.  

Statuesque buildings will explore the spectral nature of building types.  From the words used to describe what constitutes a particular building type to the images that seem to capture its principal qualities, type tends to remain somewhat elusive.  What is it about a house that constitutes its house-ness?  A bank about its bank-ness?  Types also evolve and tend to blend into each other over time.  Yet there is something invariant about type and the way that buildings articulate typicality without exhausting it fully.  The etymology of the word ‘type’ suggests that it, through Greek and Latin, can be understood as a figure, form or statue.  A building can be partially understood as a statue to a particular type—that is, as something that is present, yet absent.  What interests us then is not that a house has bedrooms or that a bank has a vault (to return to but two examples), but that there is something about house-ness and bank-ness that one cannot put their finger on—a quality that only be ‘entitled’, but cannot be properly named. 

Over the course of the semester, we will explore the statuesque nature of buildings and the types for which they, vicariously, stand in.  The first six weeks will be devoted to two exercises.  The first exercise will look at the words used by certain architects, even as far back as Vitruvius, to describe building in terms of type and specifically to look at the words used by the architects in describing type.  Each student will constitute their own word bank around a specific type articulating for themselves a vocabulary and grammar about a particular type.  In the second exercise, students will begin to collect images that seem to be the most similar or the most different from the qualities they believe to characterize their type.  These images will then be posed as ‘questions’ to a custom algorithm having learned the pixel content of several thousand images sourced from Tumblr.  Students will receive a spectrum of images of buildings that the algorithm thinks are closest to the ones it was given.  Working iteratively in this way, students will refine their own stance towards a particular type and its spectral nature. 

In the final half of the studio, students will choose a building in Vienna that corresponds to their building type and will design a new building for the site as if the existing one were gone.  The new building will therefore be a statue to the type and should articulate architectonically the quality of the type that cannot properly be named, but with which students will have become familiar by training with the first two exercises.