After successful completion of the course, students are able to engage in the task of writing an academic paper. Furthermore, students will attain a broader understanding of architecture, not only as a discipline aimed at the realisation of buildings (as a Baukunst), but also as a device of thinking that concerns and connects both material and ‘immaterial’ domains of production.

What is the weather like today? 

How are clouds born, or when does thinking become a thought?

Today, the increase in extreme weather events tends to inscribe meteorological manifestations into the global concern for climate change, opening up tighter articulations between our local realities and our general, systemic condition. As tempest, torrential rains and heat waves are treated as preludes to a potential apocalypse, science and engineering promise to prevent – if not to pre-empt – the reappearance of the Greek divinity Khaos in the vaporous sky above us. Simultaneously, the same meteorological terms promise other terrific informational manifestations, between clouds and data deluge.

This preoccupation for temperature variations, precipitations and air-pressure is not new. Whether at sea or on land, weather appears to have always been, indeed, a locus communis, which, beyond small talk, has given rhythm to our existences; a condition that we collectively inhabit, physically and metaphorically, through space and time. But what are really the meteora – etymologically “what is above”? How to think of rain, rainbows and winds, and these atmospheric disturbances that continue nurturing imagination and provoking “admiration”, as Descartes wrote, despite our capacity to rationalise, and describe them, quantitatively?

Philosophy, mythology, poetry, art and science will accompany this seminar’s staring at the sky and smelling the air, to explore how we can think of the meteora or, rather, how we can think in and with them. To embrace the meteora is to invite events, chance and accidents in the physical and intellectual domains, along – and not against – exactitude, determination and order. It is to conjugate the sudden and the imponderable with the systems of measure and quantification upon which our existences are built for the long term, through forecasting. In this perspective, architecture will be considered as a vessel, which navigates between the two poles of melange and purification, between porosity and enclosure, between fluidity and reification (as epitomized by the observatory – in its historical relation to horologion – and the laboratory). In thinking meteorologically, the seminar will envision architecture as a practice of locally inhabiting the universe at large, rather than solely the “face of the earth” (Morris). 

The course will develop in an online format. It will be structure in capsules, which will each be composed of: 

• online lectures (desynchronised videos)
• individual readings of the provided literature, and a set of exercises
• live collective discussions on zoom (during the seminar hours)

Lectures, readings and discussions: The students will be required to follow the lectures and prepare for the discussions, as well as to read selected excerpts from the seminar literature (around 30 pages/session). The course will alternate between lecture-related discussions and reading-related ones (every other week).

Exercises: For every capsule, the students will be required to engage in exercises related to the meteorological “figures”, which will be collected in a compendium. Every other week, the students will be required to engage in exercises related to the readings.  

Methodology: In order to get acquainted with research and develop their seminar paper, students will be required to follow the methodology video capsules (desynchronised).

All the texts will be made available on TUWEL in advance.

Lecturers:
Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou (main lecturer), ATTP
Vera Bühlmann, Head of Department, ATTP

The course is framed within a seminar structure every Wednesday from 10:00-13:00 during the Summer term. For the time being, it will take place through dedicated on-line meetings. The course will be provided in English and so is the preferred language for all other communications.

Zoom link: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/7312196454?pwd=MWlWdmRNalR3NDhZVVl0Q0ZOVWFvQT09

Zoom Meeting ID: 731 219 6454

Password: Meteora21

Further information about ATTP can be found at the following links:
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at
www.facebook.com/attp.tuwien

At the end of the seminar, participants will be asked to produce an academic paper on a topic related to the themes discussed in class. The paper will have to be written in English. Examples of previous seminar papers can be found at the following link:

http://www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/wahlseminar-architekturtheorie-ss2018

Only participants attending the course, actively engaging in the discussions and delivering the scheduled exercises will be admitted to final evaluation. Attendance and participation are therefore mandatory.

An updated list of references is to be found on TUwel.

Participants are required to possess a good knowledge of English and be able to write in such language with a sufficient degree of orthography and comprehensibility.

ATTENTION:  requirement 259.268 Ringvorlesung Methodologie der Architekturforschung