a toilet; a square; a chapel!

Leonidas Koumouris

Studio Description

a toilet; a square; a chapel.

We have returned to a moment of cultural homogeneity; a conformity of aesthetics. Things look interesting in isolation, things become boring when viewed collectively. We are expected to adhere to a conformity of nomenclature and a strict set of ideas. The public sphere doesn’t expect this of us, the academy does. But it’s pantomime, we know it is, all of us knowing that everyone else is going along with it; just like us. We’re performing this act, in the end, for no one.

We harbour a closet desire to speak about things in a way we’ve been told we can’t.

This has manifested in architecture as an academic inability to talk about beauty, to refer to things as beautiful, to allow ourselves to justify things because they simply look good. If we are not allowed to be proponents of aesthetics, then who is? We have retreated too deeply into the pragmatic without really ever discussing (or being able to discuss) the importance of aesthetics to architecture, to the public.

This is not an attempt to undermine the pragmatic or the scientific, but to join them, at the altar, with beauty. A chapel; a square; a public toilet; this is the only way to be morally economical. Each program justifies the other, not itself.

The pure pragmatism of a public toilet. Regulatory in nature, design at its edges. A chapel provides the perfect framework for aesthetic speculation. A square exists in between - passive. It must serve the audience not looking to be served.

Simultaneously, part of a chapel’s program, part of a chapel’s pragmatics, is in its aesthetics. A main requirement of a chapel is to provide a space to be spiritual, to be removed from oneself. This is impossible to quantify in the language of the illusory accord - here, we require a language of abstraction. To talk about beauty for the sake of beauty.  To talk about scale for the sake of scale.

So, we’ll attempt to do a complete work of architecture.  Simple, really. A chapel that adheres to the regulatory requirements of the 21st Century.  It’s not architecture if it doesn’t. A toilet that is spiritual. But also! a square that engages with all of the subjectivity, the wild claims, the irrationality and the contradictions involved in trying to define beauty objectively. We won’t be scared to say that something works simply because it's beautiful.

Studio Outcomes

The semester will begin with a handwritten component that will remain central to the course. The initial weeks will focus on research, personal reflection and writing, helping each student establish a clear set of parameters and a strong concept. All work will be completed by hand, during class hours only.

The Precedent and the Program - Students will engage in a precedent study of a single building - it may or may not be a chapel or public square, that’s unimportant. The exercise will be short and sharp. A clean set of documents will be produced. A plan, a section, an elevation, a render. We will operate at scales of 1:200 and 1:20. We will aim to establish a formal drawing language for each student individually and for the studio holistically.

Students will replicate the existing conditions of the site and its surrounds. Students will speculate on appropriate or inappropriate contemporary responses to a religious building, engage with more precedents, redraw, engage with classical responses, and repeat. The project will begin to take shape at scales of 1:20 and 1:200 . The detail is essential, but it is nothing without an overriding logic. Students will begin to engage with the overall programmatic assemblage, as well as primitive configurations within space. Students will slowly form a 'position' on beauty, on their response to architecture. There is no guarantee that these will be related. Students will begin to challenge 'market logic', what makes a good public space, and how to interpret global forces from within the architecture.

In the final period of semester, students will continue with their proposals, and start to formulate their ideas in both speculative representation and generic documentation. The project will balance a supremely well resolved piece of architecture with the abstraction contained in trying to define beauty. A rigorous research project manifested as architectural response. The 1:20 and 1:200 scales provide an astute level of detail and a platform for speculation, for a traditional approach to architecture made contemporary through a lack of attention. If we are not an authority on beauty, then who is?

It is an expectation that students will engage, converse and participate in class regularly, if not always. The booklet will engage deeply with PC18, PC24, PC16, PC12, PC3, PC23. Throughout the semester students will engage with a series of readings that may or may not inform their work. The aim here is to establish an understanding of theory, of world forces, and of architecture as 'hard precedent'. These things are not always compatible, and they do not need to literally be tied together or influence each other. Awareness is the key, not heavy-handed referentialism.

Studio Leaders

Leonidas Koumouris is a founding director of Koumouris Oberin PARTNERS. Koumouris Oberin PARTNERS is an architecture office based between Melbourne & Paris.

Leonidas Koumouris is a graduate from ETSAB (Barcelona) & University of Technology Sydney. He is a lecturer at the University of Melbourne.

Readings & References

Provided in class.

Schedule:
Tuesday 4pm - 7pm
Friday 3pm - 6pm

Contact Handbook