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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. 

In “Success”, we will create radiographies of buildings to measure how they project themselves--after the classical orders--to the street, the city, and indeed the nation. We will be designing one building per person based on a study of some of the above mentioned cases. Notions of success will be dealt with case by case. The focus will go towards creating physical models, drawings and “promotional videos” of each participants design. 

Introductory Reference List

PROJECTS

• Veldon Simpson, Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas, 1993
• Jean Tschumi, Nestle Headquarters, Vevey, 1959
• St Mark’s Basilica, Venice,1092
• Leavitt and Delisser Saleroom, Broadway, New York, 1856

TEXTS

• Pierre Leguillon, Barbara Fédier, Eds., Oracles – Artists’ Calling Cards, 2017
• Edward Ruscha, Real Estate Opportunities, 1970

IMAGES, VIDEOS

• Paul Émile Chabas, September Morn, oil on canvas, 1912
• The Luncheon on the Grass, Édouard Manet, oil on canvas, 1863 Thomas Seir Cummings, A Mother’s Pearls, (Portraits of the Artist’s Children), watercolor on ivory, 1841
• 425 Park Avenue, various architects: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NxcQTnb1WVk
• Al Pacino, “Inch by Inch”, 1999
• William Wallace, “Speech From the Battle of Stirling Bridge”, 1297

OTHER

• Aaron Schwartz, http://www.imageatlas.org 

We are interested in participants that:
-want to question the manner and method of generating architectural work;
-possess a willingness to convert a scepticism of existing discourses into their own forthright position and ideas;
-have an openness to elaborate rich and personalised creative mediums to realise their position and ideas; 

Participants must demonstrate:
-an endeavour to use the opportunity of the studio to generate an original work;
-an interest to engage in discursive sessions to develop a theoretical basis of their project. 

Attendance every Friday and punctuality are a must.

**Attendance is compulsory. The studio runs as a progression of thought and drawing overtime. It is not a deadline oriented only studio, and the work intensively is distributed evenly through out the semester. 

The final delivery will be an individual “Success” project, comprised of: a “radiography” of a precedent space, a Material-That-Never- Existed (MTNE ie. a video, collage or physical fragment), a project text, sections/plans/volumetry and five images of a fully accomplished building. Knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite (eg. Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign), Rhinoceros (Grasshopper is an advantage) is a minimum requirement.