Academic Design Office, supervised by Jo Van Den Berghe and Louise De Brabander
Engagement: Craftsmanship
The Architectural Detail: Technè = Poiesis?
Research Themes
This AOB.ADO builds on architectural practice, and on research on architectural practice. The central discourse of this AOB.ADO revolves around this basic argument: a creation process in architecture all too automatically is considered as a unidirectional process that starts with the poetic image (π)[1], that subsequently is substantiated on the construction site.
TT -> ©
The research of Jo Van Den Berghe (Van Den Berghe 2012, 2016) has revealed that this assumed unidirectionality is false, that the process of creation, which includes the substantiation, is much more negotiated, two-directional, and that the poetic image (π) is often more triggered by construction practice (©). The dream is triggered by the Substance.
TT <- -> ©
This AOB.ADO proposal navigates in the slipstream of Studio Anatomy, connects with critical and poetic approaches of building technology and starts from three observations.
Research Questions.
Introductory Discussion:
“Tradition cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twnety-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity” (T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, first published in The Egoist, London, 1919).
The AOB.ADO starts from critically questioning the contemporaneity of architectural practice, and on its agency and position when intervening in the fragility of existing architectural bodies, including physical landscapes, that we inherit as 21st century Europeans. These fragile bodies are repositories of future wellbeing and cultural sustainability. The cultural quality of this intervening depends on the material precision with which it is done, hence the content and nature of the following research questions:
Method and Format: Drawing Dialogues through 7 Etudes
The act of drawing occupies the centre of the method of this studio. The architectural drawing is predominantly the locus of research rather than the medium of communication, hence going way beyond its mere role as representation. Drawing is also at the centre of the research of Jo Van Den Berghe.
In ADO+ The Architectural Detail, drawing will revolve around full scale 1/1 drawings of architectural details, closely connected with the dimensions of the human body, in ongoing drawing dialogues with scale 1/10 drawings, expanding into other scales of drawing, and so on.
Through drawing, 7 Etudes of Architectural Details, with a focus on window (Friedberg 2006) and door details and their adjacent structures, will be developed. Every Etude is seen as a study drawing with several layers of versions, combined with sketches and scale models of these architectural details that investigate variants and variables. It is the aim to further develop this as a method and an expertise, so as to become a centre of expertise.
The Workspace of the Academic Design Office
This research will accurately simulate an architectural practice in the following ways:
External Partners
TAKA Architects, Dublin / Steve Larkin Architects, Dublin / Clancy-Moore Architects Dublin.
Flores & Prats Architects, Barcelona / ETH Zürich.
Prof. Elizabeth Hatz, KTH Stockholm / SAUL Limerick.
Prof. Gennaro Postiglione, Politecnico di Milano.
Prof. Neven Fucks, Oslo School of Architecture / Studio Sverre Fehn / Studio Alvar Aalto.
Prof. Jo Taillieu, EPFL Lausanne.
References
[1] The concept of the poetic image has been brought forward by Vitruvius, who called it the architectural idea, and following from this, Alberto Pérez-Gómez has further elaborated on it, “… the poetic image, called after Vitruvius the architectural idea (the images that are proposed by the architect, issuing from his or her mind’s eye” (Pérez-Gómez 2006).
07.07.20 | Student’s Work 2019-2020 |