Methods & Tools
Third Year Design Studio, Even Semester 2019-2020
METHODOLOGY
This semester the design project is conceived as a mini thesis project in an area of individual interest but having the notion of public. Students define their own brief within the unit’s contextual responsibilities and use derivatives from precedent and antecedent to examine ‘hybrid’ design constructs placed in an urban setting.
A range of subjects – humanistic, environmental and technological, shall be interspersed. Students draw from the learnings in the previous term and engage in quick ‘mapping’ and deductive exercises to comprehend the ‘contextual ‘placement of the architectural object. The studio continues to dwell on the ecological responsibilities of the ‘built’ habitat focusing on articulation, formal and tectonic; that form the conditions of its operation, affect our daily life and provide possible projective futures.
The studio shall build from analysis to synthesis; from analysis of the locational ‘tangibles’ and ‘intangibles’ to synthesis of meaningful building constructs with ‘alternate’ forms of architectural sensibility and aesthetic that strengthens our understanding of the habitat. The studio will explore structures or environments that accommodate multiple functions at the same time, sequentially, or at periodically recurring events.
Continuing the pursuit of architectural ‘learning by doing’, and following on from the rigorous ‘prototypical’ bottom-up approach, this term the students shall be introduced to digital methodologies, of to investigate the specificities of the ecological parameters and the interdependencies, and to comprehend the tight dependency existing between serial determinations of: the geometric and material order of the architectural construct, its tectonic and environmental implications; and its iconographic performance in today’s metropolis.
The studio will seek a collaborative process that engages in an iterative methodology and generation of systemic diagrams / algorithms (digital as well as analogue). Followed by synthesis in the form of physical prototype constructs with possible capacities to design ‘assemblies’ contiguous with the derivatives and eventually inform architectural stratifications.
We are interested in investigating the value-system overlaps which can possibly allow architecture constructs to sense, interpret, accommodate, adapt and respond to parametric alterations. Advanced digital design technologies are used in all studios, allowing students new forms of abstraction, representation, and expression.
TOOLS
Rhinoceros
Sketchup
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Aftereffects
Twinmotion
Lumion
Enscape
Corel Draw
3D Printing
Laser cutting