Studio 12
CHAMBORD INACHEVÉ
Toby Reed
Studio Description
“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. Nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. Considering the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface”.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 2001
Within this studio, students will take part in the international design competition and exhibition, Chambord 1519-2019: Utopia at Work. The term utopia (from the Greek οὐ-τόπος meaning 'no place') is the representation of an ideal society, one without flaws, unlike reality. However, Utopia can also mean a reality that is hard to acknowledge - something that can be dismissed as fanciful, or viewed as irrational. These two definitions, underline the friction between two differing beliefs: either a way of thinking about reality through fiction, or a radical dissociation between dream and action, or the ideal and the real.
Through an exploration of the writings and critical voice of Svetlana Boym, where she examines the themes of Construction and Destruction, Nostalgia, Perspectivism, Ruinification, Romanticism and Hybrid Utopias, students will develop fictional representations based on constructed realities. Like ruins, the ‘unfinished’ nature of Chambord invokes ideas of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time.
The aim of the competition is to re-draw a map of the world but in the opposite direction, not to rediscover the world but to find out how the world interprets the Chateau de Chambord, how the world represents this unfinished utopia, and to create a collection of utopian projects influenced by very diverse cultural and geographical situations – speculative imaginings that traverse between an ideal and the real.
For this purpose, nineteen universities have been selected across five continents to present their submissions on a 1m30 film to be projected or played on screens (several films can of course be shown on each screen) along with twenty or so images per team. Four of the entries will be selected to be part of the final exhibition, curated by Dominique Perrault. The teams will also submit a text (1500 words) for the exhibition and a longer text (5000 words) for the catalogue.
Studio Leader
This studio will be led by Toby Reed, with visiting critic Alan Pert.
Toby Reed is a director of Nervegna Reed Architecture. Toby Reed’s projects include the Arrow Studio and the PEP Dandenong (Precinct Energy Project) as well as urban design and master-planning in China. The PEP Dandenong lead the way in Australian architecture for green district energy, being the first precinct in Australia to be powered by co-generation. NR also makes architectural videos many of which have been recently featured at the MPavilion.
ST1/12 Tuesdays 13:00-16:00 in MSD Room 139
ST2/12 Tuesdays 18:15-21:15 in MSD Room 137