Studio 22
Capriccio, Folly, City
Kim Võ and Richen Jin
This studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90142 Studio C, ABPL90143 Studio D, and ABPL90115 Studio E.
Studio Description
‘Just what polemical position do you write from, madam?’
‘From Crisis to Crisis.’ - Ada Louise Huxtable
Despite the occupational habit of an architecture critic, Ada’s determination mocked us.
No human artifact has managed to captivate our fascination like the city. We measure it, map it, visualise its condition, growth, and expansion. Yet, the ‘modern’ attempt to comprehend it through abstract ‘data’ has put the city into crisis.
Studio 22 proposes to investigate the formal and informal relationship between architecture and the city; as well as the idea of architecture as a form of knowledge and why we need continuous and refreshing criticism in architecture. Through critical studies of previous master architects and their projects, we will critically examine the Post-modernist discourses on the city from architectural viewpoints, to react against the Modernist managerial approach to city.
Studio Outcomes
Students will engage with precedent projects of selected Post-modernist architects as well as a library of given media including interviews, experts of literature, films. Combining the finished/unfinished works of architect and banal/metaphysical ideas of media, students will investigate:
- The image of an ‘ideal’ city of its current state (Capriccio)
- The extent of the city through formal and informal compositions (Folly)
Through first 2 exercises and development phase students will move into the final project with the aim to design/recompose a city (City), which of the selected architect’s quote is used as a drive. Consequently, students should understand the role of architecture in the city, how architecture shapes the image and experience of the city and vice versa.
Studio Leaders
Kim Võ is an architecture graduate from the University of Melbourne, where he was a recipient of the Dean’s Honour Award in 2018 and 2019. Together with Scott Wood, he ran Studio 8: the Home, the Monument, the Museum in 2020, in which the idea of Aldo Rossi’s architecture is interrogated through its displacement within the MAXXI. He is the current Senior Studio Tutor in Foundations of Design: Representation.
Richen Jin unorthodoxparadigm.com
Readings & References
- Aureli, Pier Vittorio, ed. The City as a Project. Berlin: Ruby Press, 2016.
- Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011.
- Butler, Christopher. Post-modernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Hertweck, Florian and Sébastien Marot, eds. The City within the City: Berlin: A Green Archipelago. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2013.
- Steil, Lucien, ed. The Architectural Capriccio: Memory, Fantasy, and Invention. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014.
- Rossi, Aldo. “The Analogous City: Panel.” Lotus International, no. 13 (December 1976): 4-13.
- Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Translated by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984.
- Vidler, Anthony. “History of the Folly.” In Follies: Architecture for the Late-Twentieth-Century Landscape, edited by B.J. Archer, 10-13. New York: Rizzoli, 1983.
Schedule Mondays 09:00-12:00, Thursdays 09:00-12:00