Studio DE/22

Autonomy

Richen Jin

Studio Description

The subdivision of labor and discipline in modern society have exacerbated design and research methods of architecture to a breaking point. Newly coined 'isms' and genres have inexorably bombed architecture, poses a crisis to the discipline.

We often end up with 2 polarized, equally bad commodities:

• it be disenchanted ‘avant-garde’, wacky ‘organic’ forms, entailing a ‘motif’ with its seemingly endless budget and opposingly avalanching finish quality.
• it be beautified deadest modernist boxes with calculated greeneries and it’s absolute leveraging of the hottest political lingos, standing on a moral high ground to maximize the indulging and absorbing capitalist gesture of generosity.

We cannot replace the formal and spatial issues with stats analyses, technological optimism, and political correctness. We need to look back at the architecture itself, it’s autonomy as a discipline.

Studio 22 propose to look back at 4 architects whose oeuvre and theories suggested a critical and lucid stance towards architectural autonomy and city:

• Hiromi Fujii
• Aldo Rossi
• John Hejduk
• Shin Takamatsu

Through critical studies of their theories and built/unbuilt projects, we will examine and reflect the autonomous architecture discourses on the contemporary setting (context).

Studio Outcomes

Through 7 selected built/unbuilt projects of Fujii, Rossi, Hejduk, and Takamatsu, we will investigate the idea of autonomy in architecture:

Phase 1 - Agamben’s ‘paradigm’ studies on site, site project and drawing technique.

Phase 2 – Folly designs in S, M, L via chosen architect’s method and language.

Phase 3 – Carry the material from Phase 1 and 2, interrogate an alternative idea of a city: to construct/recompose a city within a city.

Studio Leader

Richen’s interest lies in Fujii and Gregotti’s body of work 1964-1985; the synthesis of their implicit anti-Zeitgeist/Genius loci on autonomous architecture and its latent & (non)contingent materialization in Australia.

unorthodoxparadigm.com

Readings & References

• Aureli, Pier Vittorio, ed. The City as a Project. Berlin: Ruby Press, 2016.
• Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “More and More About Less and Less: Notes Toward a History of Nonfigurative Architecture.” Log, Spring/Summer 2009, No. 16 (Spring/Summer 2009): 7-18.
• Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011.
• Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The project of Autonomy, Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism. New Jersey: Princeton Press, 2008.
• Trummer, Peter. “The City as an Object: Thoughts on The Form of the City.” Log, Winter/Spring 2013, No. 27 (Winter/Spring 2013): 51-57.
• 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.
• The Harvard Architecture Review. Vol.3. Autonomous Architecture. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1984.

Schedule
Mondays and Fridays 18:15-21:15 in MSD Room 241

Contact Handbook