Studio website: www.domgross.com

The students will explore speculative methods adapted to design - conceptually as well as materially - with "information as material," and "material that embodies information".

No Ghost. From Mass to Building

with Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds as Guest Professors (www.palacepalace.com)

What can count as meaningful for today¿s architectonic buildings and places? For classical ideas about order it was clear that every thing must have its proper "place" in nature. Modern ideas of order maintained that every thing must have it s proper and natural "function". As well-ordered counted where nothing remained superfluous. In congruence to these ideas we are often told that for today¿s paradigm of information societies, we are challenged with a "flood of information" and that we need to sort, somehow, between relevant and irrelevant information. But what is actually happening in this process that prepares what counts as "suitable" and what as "superfluous"? What role is noise playing with regard to information?

This design studio  "No Ghost. Mass to Building" relates to the industrial theme of "Readymades" and seeks crystallise what we call "Made Realms": we invent  "Materials-That-Never-Existed" (MTNE) by "dating" found objects. 

What is common to all things material is the following quadruple of activities: all things material "keep in stock" information (storage), they "prepare and recycle" information (deal with), they "emit and discharge" information (sending), and they "receive and accommodate" information. What is the role of the architect in such a world, where "historicity" and "dating" depend upon techniques of "sourcing", "encrypting" and "deciphering", where it is all about learning to "write" with code, where a novel kind of literacy is in the process of emerging? 

The final delivery will be a building, a title for it and the characterization of its use. Media used will be texts, images and final drawings of plans, sections, details, and a physical model or fragment.