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. 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). 

The lecture course introduces the students to contemporary challenges in architecture, and it provides a spectrum of manners of dealing with them.There will be three introductory lectures. Then we will invite architectural studios for work presentations with a subsequent podium discussion. The students are meant to gain insights into the praxis of contemporary architectural studios. They will learn about interesting strategies with which contemporary architects know how to face the challenges of their time. They will develop a taste for inventing such strategies in order to be critical, but also successful.

The Very Many and the Big Plenty: Quantity and the Precious

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?
How can we learn to recognize and to designate them (in the sense of naming)?
How can we estimate their weight, represent them in their profiles? this lecture course provides exercises for students in achieving exactly this – through not banalising quantities, but through taking them serious and through recognising them as something precious.

Means of proceeding
These are the themes we want to engage with by several means:

- Introductory lectures to set up and contextualise the theme of the Semester (Quantity in Contemporary Architecture)
- Confrontation with selected architectural texts (manifestoes, essays, treaties, etc) collected in a reader
- Studio Encounters, Work presentation, and podium discussion

PROGRAM

Mo  16.10.2017
11:00 - 13:00
Audi Max
The Very Many and the Big Plenty //
Vera Bühlmann & Emmanuelle Chiappone- Piriou, ATTP

Mo 23.10.2017
11:00 - 13:00
Audi Max
Big Data: Chronicles of the Contemporary //
Diana Alvarez-Marin und Miro Roman, ETH Zurich
Readings: UTOPIA OF QUANTITY
Utopia of Quality, Utopia of Quantity, IN, January – February 1971
No-Stop City, Residential Car Park, Universal Climatic System, Domus, n°496, March 1971

Mo 30.10.2017
11:00 - 13:00
Audi Max
Digital Atlas for Architects: How to deal with a lot // 
Ludger Hovestadt, ETH Zürich
Readings: TOTALITY
Konstantinos A. Doxiadis, excerpt from: Building Entopia. Athens: Athens Publishing Center: (1975)

Mo 06.11.2017
17:00 - 19:00
HS 11 (with livestream to GM 5 Praktikumshörsaal, Getreidemarkt)
Studio Encounter One: Affecting //
Plasma Studio, Holger Kehne
Readings: SCIENCE
Yona Friedman, Towards a scientific Architecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1975 (original version 1972)

Mo 20.11.2017
17:00 - 19:00
HS 11
Studio Encounter Two: Taking Measure//
CERTAIN MEASURES, Tobias Nolte
Readings: STATISTICS
Le Corbusier, “Statistics”, Urbanisme, Paris, G.Grès, 1925. 

Mo 18.12.2017
17:00 - 19:00
HS 11  
Studio Encounter Three: Exuberance //
PaLacePaLace, Valle Medina & Benjamin Reynolds
Readings: MEGASTRUCTURES
Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form, Washington University, St Louis, 1964
Also look at: Feuerstein and Banham (tba) 

Mo 08.01.2017
17:00 - 19:00
HS 11
Studio Encounter Four: Industriousness // 
OFFICE: Kersten Geers David Van Severen (invited)
Reading: INFLATION
Hans Hollein, « Alles ist Architektur – Introduction 1 », BAU, 1 – 2, 1968 

Mo 15.01.2017
17:00-19:00
HS 11             
Studio Encounter Five: Hinging // 
Edouard Cabay-Appareil / IAAC
Readings: IMAGINATION AND THINKING    
O.M. Ungers, Morphologie, City Metaphors, Köln, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2017. First publication: 1982.

• written exam (determines the mark)

PRÜFUNGSTERMIN 1

upload your TABLE TEXTS as a PDF until 22.01.2018, 23:55

PRÜFUNGSTERMIN 2

upload your TABLE TEXTS as a PDF on 23.03.2018 until 23:55

PRÜFUNGSTERMIN 3

(in may 2018)

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HOW TO...?

TABLE TEXT DETAILS:

formalia:

. between 500 and 1000 words

. choose carefully your title for the text

. in English or in German Language 

. don't forget your Name and Matrikel Nr.

Exercise yourself in applying the theoretical distinctions which you learnt during the Semester -

from the theory texts (available via TISS) and studio presentations (guest lectures).

weight for the grade:

ORIGINALITY (single count) - What is the idea in your text? Make sure the title expresses it!

QUALITY (double count) -  Expressing the idea: what are the means applied? Structure/Style/Language/Genre (prose, verse, text-collage, argument):

1) make sure you have correct Grammar/Orthography. 

2) are you in control of the rhetorics you use? 

3) are you using a precise vocabulary? 

4) Is your title chosen carefully?

PRESENTATION (single count) - Completeness of the document 

Overall consistent design, name + Matrikel Nr, date, email, references to citations (if any were used, according to academic standards), delivery in time.

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How to... ?

This, you will have to invent.
It is up to you to take a stance.

Don't explain what a table is.
Show us what it is. In words precisely placed in your text.

It is hard to say something interesting about an object as abstract as a table. Invent how to! Express your idea in formal, articulate, distinctive terms.
Try to be elegant, rather than being "right".

Don't ask yourself: is this the most important thing about a table?
You may use the collection of existing Table Texts (TISS) as a source for inspiration.

https://quantumwords.persona.co