Venice: Projection

from Theatres by Sugimoto

Housing & Public Space

Frame

In response to the work you have so far undertaken, design a public or private/domestic room for your chosen site.

Consider your room in the context of the built landscape of Venice. Use exploratory and considered drawings and models to develop your room's quality of space, its materiality, lightness, views, light and shadow. Consider who might occupy the room and what use the room is put to.

At this stage you should not be overly concerned with the constraints of site planning, your room should be an inceptive and ambitious design approach that draws on your intuitive response to Venice and its population, and begins to draw together ideas for your proposed programme.

You should work on site studies and individual projects simultaneously. Some of the site analysis can be done in groups (sunlight study, models, detailed survey etc) but it has to be described as such in your portfolios. All your individual project work needs to be individual.

Mies Van Der Rohe

Armature

Write a maximum of 100-150 words about your design approach. This should cover aspects of procurement strategy, identification of key users, construction logistics. This is the first draft of the strategic Whys and Hows of your proposal.

Things to consider

- choice of site
- choice of programme
- choice of third element to programme
- end-users
- management and procurement

Montage*

Use the work you have already carried out and are in the process of working on:

1. Aperture - Domestic Space/Public Space
2. Exposure - Virtual Venice, Split Sites and Simultaneous Spaces
3. The Campi of Venice

to inform your proposal, interests and ideas, and also provide material for drawings and other outputs.

* In film-making, a montage is a sequence of successive images or short shots. In photography, montage is a technique for combining separate elements into a single image, similar to collage. In both, a new meaning or whole is created that does not exist in the individual parts.

In film, light leaves its traces on the sensitive emulsion, imprinting on it permanent shadows. The manipulation of two realities - the superimposition of two stills, both traces of material realities - produces something that is already outside the logic of "realism." Rather than represent reality, it produces a new reality.
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity

Venice: 17 - 22 November 2008

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare by Cartier-Bresson

Monday 17 November: Arrive in Venice, meet after dinner in Campo Santa Margerita. Tuesday 18 November: Architecture Biennale. There are several pertinent exhibitions dealing with temporality, occupation, immateriality and housing: The British pavilion is showing contemporary architects working in housing in the UK and abroad and raises differences in social and economic settings. The Italian pavilion contains an exhibition called "Housing Italy: 12 projects for inhabiting and re-inhabiting the city" showing future projects, and an overview of the current situation and the legacy of Italian public housing. The Venice pavilion is exhibiting "Carlo Scarpa and the origin of things". The Polish pavilion show "The Afterlife of Buildings" questions the future use, durability and adaptability of buildings. The Irish exhibition called "the Lives of Spaces" focuses on visual narrative revealed in film and photography, and is housed in Palazzo Giustinian Lolin on the Grand Canal.

Wednesday 19 November:
Morning - Foundation Querini Stampalia, Santa Maria Formosa, Castello.
Afternoon - Il Redentore by Palladio, housing by Zucchi Architetti, Giudecca

plan of Querini Stampalia Foundation by Carlo Scarpa

Thursday 20 November: The Campi of Venice drawn survey

study of campi in two parts (work in groups):
1. Orthogonal drawings based on physical survey - plan, elevation and section. include material and detail observations.
2. Time-based study of occupation and use - this could be film-based, photographic, drawn, mapped or otherwise surveyed. you may need to combine different types of survey (activity and sunlight for instance).

Use the observations in Interaction with Architectural Space: the Campi of Venice to inform and guide your own work.
On our return to London you will give a 15 minute presentation, in your survey groups, about the text and your own surveyed observations.

1. Campo de Ghetto Novo 2. Campo de la Madonna de l'Orto 3. Campo de l'Abbazia and Campo de la Misericordia 4. Campo San Giacomo da l'Orio 5. Campo San Polo

6. Campo Santa Margherita 8. Campo San Trovaso 9. Campo Santo Stefano 10. Rialto

Friday 21 November: Site Survey

Saturday 22 November: Finish surveys and return to London

‘For an antidote to ... dehumanized places where man shows himself an unfit inhabitant of the earth, we could turn to archetypally humanized spaces like the canals and squares of Venice where even the land is built. Always cognizant of the limitations placed on them by the surrounding water, the builders of this city have contrived an integration of all its parts which gives it the deep consistency of a landscape’.
Robert Harbison,Thirteen Ways, MIT, 1997

composite photo-drawings by Andriani Plessa

hybrid drawing of imagined room and street, by Jurgita Korsakaite

Split sites and Simultaneous spaces

Text
Ensure that you update your project proposal text regularly. The text based descriptions of your work are an integral part of the years work and should be used as an ongoing aid and guide.

Portfolios
Start to develop your portfolio as a consistent body of work. The design and layout of your portfolio should be in response to your own personal design sensibilities.

Each sheet is a 'piece' and as such has been constructed by you; the portfolio itself, the manner of drawing, the visual ordering, the physicality of a piece as well as its content, are all aspects that contribute to others' understanding and your own exploration of the design process.

The pieces should be approached as forming the actual process of investigation and design - not a retrospective description.

The minimum size of your portfolio should be A2.

Friday 31st October

On Friday we will begin to explore our rooms and streets using animation and moving image techniques. These techniques will be employed to understand and develop further the quality of space, materiality, views, procession, light and shadow of your proposal.

Friday 14th November: Pin Up

Drawings for the pin up must be hybrid drawings.
Hybrid drawings use a combination of media and techniques (hand drawing, cad drawing, photography, collage, printmaking, 3d modelling, physical modelling) and are often composed of more than one view to tell at least two key ideas simultaneously.

The city is a phenomenon that exceeds all our capacity of description, representation and recording and, consequently, it is always experientially infinite. A street in a film does not end at the edge of the screen; it expands all around the viewer as a network of streets, buildings and life situations. It is exactly this activation of the imagination that is the invaluable function of literature and all art.

Juhani Pallasma, The Architecture of Image

images top to bottom: Morphosis, Slamhounds - Neil Spiller and Stuart Munro, Hannah Lambert

Exposure

Split Sites and Simultaneous Spaces Utilising the key texts propose a virtual/imagined room and street. The supplementary text is a guide to qualities of light and materiality that should be explored in your proposal.

Rules.
Your proposal must be concerned with TIME, NARRATIVE, LIGHT, MATERIALITY, OCCUPANCY and USE.

Key Dates
Friday 17th October: Brief Issued
Friday 20th November: Crit

Key Texts
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino.
Species of Spaces and Other Places, Georges Perec.
Naples, Walter Benjamin.

Supplementary Text
The Lume Materiale in the Architecture of Venice, Perspecta, Vol 24, Marco Frascari.

Lebbeus Woods, Sarajevo Reconstruction, 1994-95

Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes. p170 Here, too, there is interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness, street and home. p175, Walter Benjamin, Naples, One-way Street, and other writings.

Invisible Cities
Recommended Chapters;
Thin Cities 2, p35. Thin Cities 3, p49. Cities and Signs 5, p61. Thin Cities 5, p75. Trading Cities 4, p76. Trading Cities 5, p88. Cities and Eyes 4, p90. Cities & Eyes 5, p105. Cities and the Sky 4, p144. Continuous Cities, p 152.


Species of Spaces and Other Places, Georges Perec

Polo: ‘Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.’ ‘There is still one of which you never speak.’ Marco Polo bowed his head. ‘Venice,’ the Khan said. Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’ The emperor did not turn a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’ And Polo said ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972.

axonometric of room, approach to room and park views, by Nenad Djordjevic

Domestic Space / Public Space

Utilising both drawing and text describe a domestic space and an associated public space you know or have known and can visit.

Rules.
Every drawing throughout the year must be concerned with NARRATIVE, LIGHT, MATERIALITY and USE.

Key Texts
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino.
Species of Spaces and Other Places, Georges Perec
The Lume Materiale in the Architecture of Venice, Marco Frascari.
Immaterial Architecture, Jonathan Hill, Routledge.
This is not Architecture, Kester Rattenbury (Ed.):
Introduction, Kester Rattenbury
Chapter one, The Revelation of Order, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Routledge.

St Jerome in his Study, Antonello da Messina, (Room 62, National Gallery)

Required reading: "Saint Jerome in his Study",
in Species of Spaces and Other Places, by Georges Perec

So too in architectural drawing, light showed up late. And what it showed up when it arrived was space. It was a great conquest, but it was neither complete nor sudden; architectural space would remain, one way or another, limited by and bonded to the pictures that normally gave access to it.
Robin Evans, The Projective Cast, Architecture and its Three Geometries.

Lume Materiale

"where stones change themselves in light through architecture, and architecture exists because of light"

Inspired by both the physical and psychological notion of Lume Materiale Unit H will seek to explore an architecture of the senses, an architecture of human experience that examines the inner language of buildings, of perception, dreams and imagination.

We are interested in exploring the intangible within the tangible, the atmospheric and ephemeral within the tactile and tectonic.

The focus of our investigation will be the city of Venice and its dwindling inhabitants. We will explore the notion of a city as built landscape, constructed as a thick tapestry of interwoven layers, containing monumental past architectures, but also everyday lives and domestic rituals.

Spanning the duration of the first term, we will take part in an intense series of workshops that will give us the skills and techniques to discover Venice's intangible moments.

Aperture - Domestic Space/Public Space

This first exercise will explore a domestic space that you know or have known and its relationship to a public space. We will investigate ideas of drawing and representation and the simultaneous spaces that make up the city.

Exposure - Virtual Venice

In the second project we will study Venice from afar. We will construct our own imagined realities through photography, film, modelmaking, collage, drawing and/or a combination of these. We will look for inspiration within an existing narrative found in literature, cinematic space, music, and painting.

Projection - Venice

Towards the end of the first term we will visit the Renaissance city of Venice and study its private and public spaces. We will visit the palaces, markets, museums and domestic spaces of the city and we will be inspired by its magical labyrinthine topography. Here we will begin to conceive of new constructions that while mindful of the past, respond to contemporary needs and provide flexible public and private spaces as an armature for future occupancy and use.

The third exercise, entitled projection, will be the design of housing, public space and another element, sited in Venice; a new piece of the city.

Guided by your previous intuitive explorations, your architectural proposition will deal with human interactions and processes of use as well as materiality and built form; an architecture that supports and suggests inhabitations, narratives and adaptations, informed by site context and history, climate and weathering.

housing by Zucchi Architetti in the former Junghans area of Giudecca