After successful completion of the course, students are able to navigate a wide range of works from a variety of disciplines. They will learn methods for approaching works of visual art, science, and literature, making fruitful connections and practicing thinking in unfamiliar structures. The seminar is dedicated to students who want to explore various architectural writing forms and formats: Dialogic Writing, Poetic Writing, Travel Writing, and Encyclopedic Writing. The content of the seminar is designed to motivate students to engage with architecture at a different kind of scale. We want to become familiar with non-linear thinking that is orbital, discursive, and labyrinthine.
The word encyclopaedia, “enzyklos paideia”, alludes to the circle, the circumference of knowledge. This seminar aims to celebrate circumstantiality, operating in an area for which Artificial Intelligence is not trained: to sojourn in the loops of thoughts. We will think and write in the motif of the labyrinthine as an embodiment of orbital thinking. The movement results from the approach to an elemental figure, a "cloud", "wind" or "snow", whose essence is culturally comprehended but in principle intangible. It is influenced by cosmological conditions and in constant circulation. Within the Labyrinthine we become familiar with these elements. The architecture of movement is animated by impulses of selected works, from essays by Jorge Luis Borges from the edition Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings (1964) to paintings by Kay Sage, Paul Klee or Joán Miró. These will be interrogated through the optics of the chosen Elemental Figure. Each point is understood as the starting point for further ramifications that construct parallel and sometimes converging realities, in the sense of Borges. Within a Poem of the Find the unique qualities of the Elemental Figure will be articulated without ultimately defining or delimiting it. Within a Sojourning Book students will decipher the experiences and guide the reader through their labyrinth. The encirclements become vaster and vaster as we become more familiar with the counteracting elements. In the fourth cycle, we will work together on an architectural encyclopedia that translates cosmological experiences into an architecture of a different scale, following Junya Ishigami in Another Scale of Architecture (2019). In this section, we will test out how individual observations from a seemingly foreign subject area can be translated into assertions and absurdly relevant questions for architecture. What can it learn from the clouds in terms of its formulation of boundaries? What would an architecture look like that incorporated the power of the wind into its structure? We will reflect on how concepts that are valid at other scales might change our understanding of architectural spatial experiences and boundaries. The methodology of the labyrinth serves to think an encyclopedia for holistic circulating design.
The seminar is structured into four cycles of different formats. The writing will embody the movement through the labyrinth: meandering, turning, sojourning in dead-ends, never getting too comfortable in the spaces, and always staying in motion, including repetitions of movements, the refrain. Through spatial writing, thinking is getting memorised. Each session consists in reading, thinking, expressing and writing.
Thursday, 10:00 - 13:00
Starting: 12.10.2023Place: Seminar Room ATTP (AP01.24)
The evaluation considers the active participation in class and the delivery of the exercises. The ability to engage with the concepts and content of the course in innovative ways will be considered. Students should be able to distinguish and articulate various formats, and genres of writing. Weekly exercises will be presented and discussed in the sessions, and students will have time to work on them for the final delivery.
Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings, Buenos Aires 1964Borges, Jorge Luis: The book of sand, New York 1977Braidotti, Rosi; Hlavajova, Maria (Hg.): Posthuman Glossary, London; New York 2018Erben, Dietrich (ed.): Das Buch als Entwurf: Textgattungen in der Geschichte der Architekturtheorie. Ein Handbuch, Paderborn 2019Ishigami, Junya: Another Scale of Architecture, 2019Klee, Paul: Notebooks. The thinking eye, London 1961Pallasmaa, Juhani; McCarter, Robert: Understanding Architecture. A Primer on Architecture as Experience, London 2012
