Many of the ambitions revolve around the topic of excess as a redefinition of beautiful lust and—misfit aesthetics of exuberance and sophisticated conditions of arousal. If design is typically derived from an expertise related to form and proportion, a theory of mutation is possibly an advanced critical stance toward formal traditions. A theory of excessive form is not a rejection of the formal traditions but an extension of them. Further, navigation through the topologies of excessive form can be understood as an intensification of more traditional formal strategies.
> Application open / New Course Starts in June 2012
Fall entry in October possible!
Head: Hernan Diaz Alonso
Teaching: Steven Ma, Jose Carlos Lopez Cervantes
Guests and visiting Professors among others: Klaus Bollinger, Greg Lynn, Wolf D. Prix, Marcelo Spina
EXCESSIVE investigates strategies in architectural design. Working in a laboratory environment, students will develop knowledge by investigating and applying the possibilities of emerging theories, as well as testing new design territories such as scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, new materials, and cellular systems. Studio projects, alongside related design workshops and seminars, will focus on the challenges of developing and expanding the domain of emerging technologies in the design and production of architecture.
How boring has perfection become?
Evidence of this lies in the fact that our contemporary design obsessions are based on an appreciation for the perversity of mutant form, a taste learned from the movies and set to work on architecture. It is produced in the act of design – in the focused sensation of pointing and clicking that is more like painting than engineering. Image-forms are the product of speed up and slow down, slice and blend, fuse and separate – repetitions of scenic rhythms learned from a lifetime of being awed by cinematic affect.
Historically, architecture begins with a concept, an overall strategy or some kind of pre-meaning. This course proposed a re-examination of the possibility of form generation as an autonomous act. As an extension of this interest, student research focused more specifically on the degree to which autonomous geometrical forms could be interpreted as an accumulative mutation, or as having latent affective potential. How might architectural order be productively mutated (if not entirely mutilated) by the organizational influence of formal and geometric effects? Advanced modeling software generated the potential for what students began to see as a productive migration away from conventional notions of totality (typically thought of in planometric terms) and towards a reconsideration of architecture as something less determinate. Students began to think of micro behaviors as being less quantifiable in nature and more as the product of specific qualities, in particular the notion of space and form as an embodied experience. Additionally, design involves a translation between form and image. More than 'textuality' or even 'iconography', its very form is a secondary function of how it performs as an image. Some may see this as a triumph of superficiality over depth, but it is also an intensification of the conjectural and fictive logics of design, of its ability to mobilize a social imagination and with it a series of potential futures. This course saw this as a real and complex demand that global network culture places on producers of architectural content.
Every Year the course will focus on a specific topic that would provide means to the advance and mutation of the emerging paradigms of Aesthetics as the main vehicle for the evolution of the autonomy of the discipline.
Special workshops and guest will support the effort of the studio. The studio proposes to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity. In the context of these conditions, the course will focus in the generation and production of mutant micro behaviors that will accumulate to create species from systems. This program is comprised of three semesters, nevertheless, it is not compartmentalized in three topics, and instead it will be organized as a continuous played out in three acts.
Current Course
The topic for the 2011/2012 course is Museum and Exhibitions, focusing on the development on a new conception of specie that can replace type; we will focus on the iconicity and cellular contraction for a new character and aesthetics for a seminal presence in the contemporary culture of architecture.
