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"Success" is a studio run by Dom Gross with Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds (Pa.LaC.E, palacepalace.com) and supported by Vera Bühlmann.
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“I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.” (Kanye West)
Such that modern life insists that we participate, we share an unfailing impetus to do well. An album is considered a best-seller if it goes platinum, a saturated web presence means a career can proliferate, the curricula vitarum (course of life) is a space for promotional.
Text propaganda, institutions seek olympians to legitimize budgets, hygienics means trust and safety.
Since the criteria for success may be relative to a particular observer (critically acclaimed does not mean profitable), we will not debate the markers of a successful project, instead we will deliver a spectrum of effective criteria to create motivational architectural projects.
We’ll also consider the idle, useless, backward, retrograde. In particular, we will examine successful through their processes of variation, mutation, competition and inheritance. Possible strategies of architectural projects could be: acquiring their own language considered as market strategy (ie. concrete words can produce neutrality to attract), thematized images as per a culture’s code of behaviour; the quality and fetish of being a limited edition etc.
Start of the studio: Friday 09/03/2018, 9:30 am.
Regular presentations or ‘Pin-Ups’: Fridays, 9:30-12:00.
Workshops: Fridays 13:00, plus (irregularly) Saturday’s
Guest critics will be invited for mid-term and final reviews.
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A studio excursion is scheduled to Ljubljana 23rd to 26th of March. For more information please enquire with Susanne Stöller: sekretariat@attp.tuwien.ac.at
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COURSE SCHEDULE
The course will run in a sequential set of assignments as a handbook, but not as a recipe. Each student is required to follow closely this handbook to deliver at the end a building.
PART 0 CONCEPTION
Week 1 (AM) – Utopos (I)
We will be exposed to video material (from the motivational speeches, to manufacturers, to event organizers...) and to influences that we will examine in order to expand collectively notions of about Temperaments (image sensibilities). We will build a vast repertoire (a Databank) of terminologies and visual material to be used within individual projects.
We will work in parallel on “Tresors” (precedent examples that contain ideas on veneers, the bestseller, best practices...) to identify what is successful about them and where success resides in them. A list of themes and a list of buildings will be provided and will be distributed individually.
Week 1 (PM) – Flows
Workshop on ways to correlate working files with different digital tools.
Week 2 – Premises
“Premises” are understood as characteristic rooms belonging to “Tresors”. As a collective effort, we will work on collecting premises to serve as possible postulations for individual projects. How can we evolve a spatial argument by effectively co-opting (from the latin cooptare, from co- ‘together’ + optare ‘choose’) its information and behavior? How can we inherit and transmit cultural, symbolic, natural and technical characterizations?
Week 3 – Excursion
Field excursion to Ljubljana. We will work on finding differences between a set of live examples by exercising our powers of observation. Presentations of the buildings will be prepared and performed by the students themselves on-site. This trip is connected to the course, please get in contact for more details. A hotel will be organized by the department for everyone, but the means of transportation must be individually organized. Grants are offered as well for those students whom inquire for them.
Week 4 – Birth Certificate
Individualized Fact Sheets.
Formation of personal promises (unique to a premise). Promises usually start as disqualified spaces, as organizational charts. It is by their qualification through language and Temperaments (images associated to them) that we can start to render them successfully.
PART 1 ORIGINATION
Week 5 & 6 – Material-that-Never-Existed
From the databank and upon reflection of your chosen Tresor, you will create a “Material-that-Never-Existed” (MTNE). Rehearsal on the narration of the text and material formed.
Week 7 – Utopos (II)
Mid-term review with external guests.
The presentation is oriented as a pitch of ideas. During this day, students will be paired by means of conceptual, technical, digital, dialectical aptitudes.
PART 2 TRANSFORMATION
Week 8 & 9 – “Positions”
A proto-project (an organizational diagram coupled with a volumetric study) is formed by colliding a set of Premises, the MTNE and the Birth Certificate.
*Dry Run (*Dry runs are rehearsals on how to comunicate your project)
Week 10 – “Ultra-Resolution”
Translate digitally materiality, in detail.
Week 11 – “In Flesh and Shadow”
Image/video to communicate the building.
PART 3 STAGE
Week 12 – “Alchemy”
Final physical model. Rehearsal of a written script.
Week 13 - Stage
Final review with external guests. Selected material published at www.domgross.com.