AA Diploma Unit 9 2011-12 Natasha Sandmeier CONTEXT 2 From Room to Universe and Back Again Diploma 9’s interrogation of ‘context’ will continue to blur the line between fantasy and fiction as we design worlds challenging the conventional form of an architectural project – one that must reconnect with the larger cultural context. As such, our discourse hovers between the 70’s architectural theory of contextualism and the contemporary use of fiction to test the extreme form of an idea. In 2010/11, our first year of the Context series we brought the wunderkammer into the unit as a conceptual and historical precedent. This year we integrate it as a design project in collaboration with the larger project of the year – using it to expand and shape our constructed contextual relationships. The Room of Wonder will operate in its historical form as a microcosm of a more expansive world, offering the viewer, and more importantly, the designer, the ability to reinterpret the large (your project) by reconfiguring the small (your portfolio / room). A room tells a story through its collection, display and arrangement of objects, and is the mediator between our imagination and our architecture. We will borrow heavily from Duchamp’s Box in a Valise as we reinvent what it means to make a portfolio / mini-collection / portable room. We will also beg, borrow, steal, rewrite, resituate and redesign important architectural rooms and worlds; from the modernist high ground of Mies’s own reshaping of Americana, Rem’s re-origination of Manhattan with Delirious, to the Eameses’ media saturation of the house that describes a new form of space, image, and lifestyle – to name a few. As we swap between the scales and context of our rooms and the worlds beyond, we will embody these designers’ absolute capacity for singular and persuasive vision – each of them designed universes, not just projects. Each student will begin the year by writing a personal manifesto, whose expression frames the year ahead, and sets up the context (artefacts, events, materials, histories, and spaces) of the proposal. In terms 1 & 2 we will collaborate with the graduate History and Critical Thinking programme through a series of seminars on architecture and context. The unit trip will take us to Copenhagen and Madrid.
Kim Bjarke (AA Dipl Honours 2011) used the IIT campus, and his version of its iterative expansion to interrogate the coveted concept of authenticity and originality. He encases Mies’s room within his own transparent space to multiply the readings of both old and new.
Katerina Scoufaridou (AA Dipl 2011) recreates the archive of Bibliotheca Marciana to curate her project’s history and future.
Architectural Association School of Architecture
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