INSTITUT FÜR KUNST UND ARCHITEKTUR
ADP ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION CMT CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY
www.akbild.ac.at/ika
ESC ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE
INSTITUTE REVIEW FOR ART WINTER AND 2021 ARCHITECTURE
(THEOPHIL HANSEN’S ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS VIENNA) FIRST SEMESTER Christina Condak Daniela Herold Benjamin Baar Jasper Knaebel Ambrosia Köb Anna Kollmann-Suhr Dóra Kovács Valerie Mauerhofer Philipp Ortinger Oskar Pollack Sophia Rettl Manuel Rugo Elena Schlüter Hannah Schmidleitner Florian Schüly Hanna Thomaseth ADP THE POINT CLOUD, THE BASEMENT AND THE SPIRAL STAIR with Wolfgang Tschapeller, Damjan Minovski, Werner Skvara HTC WHAT ABOUT THE GRID? with Angelika Schnell GLC NEW WAYS OF ENTERING with Lisa Schmidt-Colinet ESC WHAT YOU DON’T SEE with Hannes Stiefel CMT FRAGMENTS with Michelle Howard, Günther Dreger, Rüdiger Suppin
WAYS OF KNOWING A BUILDING The first semester studio project was structured by six exercises. Upon returning to the Academy building after its long renovation, we intended to prolong the sense of unfamiliarity that new students would initially experience. Each consecutive exercise that would unlock and reveal a new space probed the building and sought a different way of observing and drawing. These curiosities led to a variety of tools learned in order to see and DESCRIBE THE SITE. The drawings ranged from technical and analytic to notational recordings, 3D renderings, heat maps, animations, models, and even playful design proposals. THE SECTION As a way of establishing an orientation, the students were asked to leave their studio room, 203b, and set out with measuring tapes, laser devices and ladders to measure all rooms on the south side of the building. The dimensions of essential rooms, i.e. the library, the Gemäldegalerie, the Aktsaal, the Anatomiesaal, the new ground floor art studios, as well as other spaces, were collected in order to draw hard-line sections of each individual room on tracing paper. Each section was cut in the centre of the room looking to the south interior elevation. All hand
drawings were pieced together on the studio wall into one collective longitudinal section at a scale of 1:20. THE SECTION OF THE WHOLE BUILDING SHOWED THE SPACES SIMULTANEOUSLY, REVEALING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ROOMS, PROGRAMMES AND PEOPLE. This we called the “Science of Sections”, to see how things are situated, such as finding our own studio position just above the Gemäldegalerie and exactly above Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Last Judgement, and to see the kind of structure that allows for those spaces. But then, we also discovered our false assumptions, our measuring mistakes and size discrepancies, while putting the drawings together. They just didn’t fit – as it turns out, not all windows are the same in the paintings gallery, for example. The exercise was repeated digitally in AutoCAD or Rhino, implementing the corrections made, and a new section was assembled from a series of pieces into a whole. THE POINT CLOUD, THE BASEMENT AND THE SPIRAL STAIR From the “Science of Sections” we moved on to the “Science of Documentation” to find more ambiguous spaces in the Academy building (hidden spaces, dark spaces, hard-to-reach places). Inevitably, the lower basement and stairwell drew our attention to their niches, vaults, shafts and strange doors. The 3D scanner was set up, and a workshop was held to learn to use the tool. THE 3D SCANNER ALLOWED US TO MEASURE IN 360° AND TO RECORD INFORMATION QUICKLY, ESPECIALLY IN AREAS THAT WOULD BE TOO DIFFICULT TO REACH. The goal was for each student to record a space of the basement as a point cloud. They then joined all the point clouds together to transform them into a 3D drawing to be attached and shared. Clipping sections in the Rhino models were to be cut, and a sequence was to be created. The final project resulted in a collective animated film about moving through the basement from a fly’s point of view. WHAT ABOUT THE GRID, MR. HANSEN? As part of the large-scale urban development along the Ringstrasse in the 1860s and onward, the Academy building was one among several monumental buildings. It was common for all public buildings at the time to emphasize glory and representation, expressed by the rhythmic layout of spaces, the introduction of grids, the symmetrical arrangement of the façades, and the repetition of elements. IT HAS BEEN CLAIMED THAT HANSEN’S UNDERLYING GRID DESIGN, WITH ITS OVERLAPS AND SHIFTS, WAS A SYSTEM TO ALLOW FOR ADJUSTMENTS AS THE PROGRAMME MIGHT CHANGE, RAISING THE QUESTION OF WHETHER THIS BUILDING IS PART OF THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNISM IN SOME WAY – A LOOSENESS TO THE BUILDING THAT IS NOT QUITE EXPERIENCED. THE STUDENTS WENT OUT IN SEARCH OF THE GRID. NEW WAYS OF ENTERING THE BUILDING In a one-week workshop, the students studied the urban context of the Academy
building, and how it is perceived by the city. The students walked and mapped a sequence route from a room in the building out to a specified point in the nearby surroundings of the urban fabric, and back again. Ways of approaching the building and new ways of entering it were discussed. We returned to thinking in sections, extending the section to the city to see relationships of space and ground. The city was read as spaces of continuous transitions between buildings, of connections and places where people meet. THIS WAS THE FIRST AND ONLY DESIGN EXERCISE GIVEN: HOW TO ENTER THE ACADEMY BUILDING DIFFERENTLY. Since there is only one main entrance to the building, the design task called for an emphasis on public access and meeting places. Particular interests developed, for example how the public could visit the Gemäldegalerie more directly, or how to connect the canteen to the street. WHAT YOU DON’T SEE This exercise we called “Live Phenomena”. The task was to recognize and VISUALIZE LIVE PHENOMENA THAT WE NORMALLY DO NOT SEE, SUCH AS AIR, WIND, DUST, THE MOVEMENT OF THE SUN, SOUNDS, SMELLS, TEMPERATURES, AND OTHER EPHEMERAL ASPECTS. These qualities are usually not part of a building analysis. This exercise also involved other tools to be tested, such as heat detection cameras and sound equipment, as well as the need to invent our own ways of measuring phenomena, such as how to record air movement in a corridor. Unfortunately, we could not use smoke machines. These studies led to exploratory digital drawings and models, both analogue and laser-cut. FRAGMENTS: A COLLECTIVE MODEL From the investigations of the previous exercises, students selected areas, intensities and fragments to be interpreted into a 1:20 model. An armature, an echo of the grid exercise and a last-minute decision to use some surplus model making material led to A COLLECTIVE MATRIX ON WHICH TO CONNECT ONE’S OWN ACADEMY FRAGMENT. Windows and doors, varying on each floor, pieces of roof constructions, vaulted ceiling segments, stair elements, the sitting landscape of the life drawing room, sections of pipes that constitute the water, heating and air circulation infrastructure, as well as busts in the library, all together created a final model in just two weeks, in time for the open house. Christina Condak, Daniela Herold Design Studio BArch1
→ fig. 16-17 / p. 11 → fig. 20-21 / p. 13 → fig. 23 / p. 14
HTC HISTORY THEORY CRITICISM GLC GEOGRAPHY LANDSCAPES CITIES
Instructors Brno Michelle Howard, Adam Hudec and Veronika Miskovicova
CMT Michelle Howard Eva Sommeregger Sofia Abendstein Arda Arin Leonard Vincent Behrens Vladislava Bugaeva Elliott Griffith Luke Handon Paula Hauschildt Lucia Herber Justa Jasaityte Juliane Jungblut Marie Lang Ji Yun Lee Soryun Lee Majed Naseri Emma Malea Noll Laurin Saied Florentin Schumann Moritz Tischendorf Xaver Wizany
HOOKUP 1: a state of cooperation or alliance 2: an assembly or connection of components into a circuit, machine, or system 3: a device for conveying substances or information from a source to a user What direction would technology have taken if the skills that are normally attributed to women and other anomalies1 were given the attention they deserve? Starting from the premise that the first tool was not the weapon, but the carrier bag2, we built sociable collectives, upcycling discarded materials, following the path of the line through the medium of yarn. With the words of Paul Klee in mind, who insisted that the processes of genesis and growth that give rise to forms in the world are more important than the forms themselves. “Form is the end, death. … Form-giving is life”.3 Emphasis was placed on process. We looked closely at the complex workings of coordination between yarn, tool, hands and brain by hooking up to a bespoke device that we assembled together. We began with the Bilum, a string bag from Papua New Guinea made by hand, using yarn from twisted plant fibres and looping technology. Traditionally slung behind from the head, it is capable of carrying both light and heavy loads, including small children – Bilum also means womb. We explored the mathematics of the hyperbolic surface, which is difficult to represent using norm technology. In 1997, the Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina discovered that they could be represented using the ignored technology of crochet. Machines are unable to replace the dextrous hand in crochet, which resists, as Tim Ingold puts it, “how the line … has been gradually shorn of the movement that gave rise to it. Once the trace of a continuous gesture, the line has been fragmented – under the sway of modernity – into a succession of points or dots.”4 Walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing, and writing all proceed along lines. Lines can be interrupted but also have the potential to reconnect, interweave and eventually become endless. HOOKUP plus Threads and Traces
Students Brno Saša Smolej, Ana Paula Ramirez Venegas, Hsing Jen Lee, Klarissa Ach-Hübner, Diana Bevelaquova, Tarek Malaheifi This studio was conducted in tandem with a separate but intertwined master’s studio at FA VUT Brno in the Czech Republic called “Threads and Traces”. In 1748, the Habsburg monarchy was forced to cede Silesia, and chose Brno as its new centre for wool processing and textile production. Raw wool arrived from all over the world, was carded, combed, spun, and woven by women, and re-entered the world as cloths of many colours, weaves and grades. Described as the Moravian Manchester in its heyday 1850-1930, very little has survived of this golden period. We followed “Threads and Traces” where they led us and explored what we could learn from pliantly immersing ourselves in their flows and forces. In a conscious effort to calibrate between conjecture and activism, we used our finest tool, our hands, to transform bales of raw wool that arrived in much the same state as they would have done in Brno’s heyday, and navigated our way through the threads we create and the traces we leave. HOOKUP plus Threads and Traces equals ignored.technology The work of this studio collective was exhibited at KUMST Brno under the title of “ignored technology” from the 8th of January to the 4th of March 2022, and is still exhibited at the website of the same name www.ignored.technology The work was also presented at the 2nd Claiming*Spaces Conference on the 26th of March 2022 in the panel “Educating Architectures. A Feminist Culture of Learning”. www.claimingspaces.org Thanks to: Carmen Lael Hines, Ebru Kurbak, Monica Titton, Jan Kristek, Luciano Parodi, KUMST Brno, Caritas Vienna, Volkshilfe Vienna, Technical Museum of Brno, Centrum Traditional Technologies Pribor Funding AKTION OEAD, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Michelle Howard Design Studio BArch3
→ fig. 1-2 / p. 5 → fig. 14 / p. 10 → fig. 31-32 / p. 18 1 A term we use to describe those whose bodies, needs and skills are generally ignored. 2 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). 3 Paul Klee, Notebooks. Volume 2. The nature of nature. London: Lund Humphries (1973), 269. 4 Tim Ingold, Lines: A brief history. London, New York: Routledge (2007), 75.