After successful completion of the course, students are able to:

1. Identify and critically reflect on key issues relating to spatial and embodied standardization, the potential of performance and live practice to develop critical thinking in architecture
2. Apply the principles presented in class to develop a final intervention that focuses on themes such as accessibility, norms diversion, and bodies' multiplicities and apply a transdisciplinary approach to architecture.
3. Demonstrate an understanding of new and abstract ideas around performativity, identity and embodiment, through creative work
4. Carry out in-depth spatial research in an area of personal interest adapting existing frameworks in order to analyse new contexts.

Architects' Data, also simply known as the ‘Neufert’, is a reference book for spatial requirements in building design and site planning. First published in 1936 by Ernst Neufert, the book remains a first port-of-call for most designers until today. The book contains exact measurements for a range of domestic items, from vacuum cleaner to kitchen utensils; agricultural and industrial facilities, from loading decks to chicken coops; and urban institutions, from banks to museums. Neufert’s spatial norms have been taught and practiced by architects for generations and became global architectural standards. At the core of the book is Neufert’s concept of ‘Rapid design’ which trains practitioners to solve architectural problems quickly and efficiently, while celebrating normative design “types” that were based on the author’s study of the dimensions of the “well-proportioned” man. The notion of the ‘standardized body’ was instigated by the Foucauldian notion of normalization, that is, the invention of the statistically “average” man. Writer Nader Vossoughian shows how over the course of the twentieth century, the book increased the designer’s dependency on handbooks and manuals, which centralized and homogenized the production of architectural knowledge and allowed the architect to exploit economies of scale, which fostered vertical integration. Moreover, the book reimagined the “art of building” as a system that standardized bodies and arranging dimensional norms. It approaches the planner as one who calculates, computes, and organizes space and its standardized aspirations lay the ground for an easy transition to a built environment that is governed by unified algorithmic protocols.

The studio will use embodied and performance-based methodologies to offer a critical reading of Neufert’s standardized architecture, within the context of the current ‘smart’, data-driven, urban terrain. Inspired by Neufert, the studio will focus on the relation between bodies and space and will pivot around the concept of access. The studio will be organized around several group workshops, in parallel to the development of students’ own projects. During the workshops, we will be using methods taken from performance to explore the relation between the body and new spatial scopes. We will investigate how urban modes of algorithmic infrastructure are crafted to replicable similar protocols first established by Neufert’s seminal book, and study the ways new techno-spatial measures redefine urban normalization.

Performance will be approached as a critical reading method that can expose the temporalities of current physical-political building entanglements. Performance and performative interchanges allow us ways of seeing the systems that organize and govern movement in all of its forms and open up possibilities of the prefigurative politics of anticipatory forms as an enduring space for productive interruptions. Like a public laboratory, this studio brings forward the possibility of using time-based and embodied tools in order to provoke and construct space for civic dialogue. Through experiential workshops and one-on-­one sessions, students work on a final intervention that will explore embodied multiplicities and treat accessibility as practice-research: a theoretical, materials and aesthetic world-making practice, and as an invitation to assemble community.

The course will alternate between on-site group workshops  (9 March, 20 April, 1 June) and online individual sessions (30 March, 11 May, 15 June).

In addition to these six sessions, three seminars by Stefano Harney, 2022/23 Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Culture, will form an integral part of this course. These sessions are mandatory and scheduled take place on the following Thursdays: 20 April, 25 May, 22 June.

Final presentations and discussion: 29 June 2023

The themes of the onsite sessions are:
- Reconsidering Access: the Contactless Condition
- Embodiment Revisited: the Smartbody and the Smart city
- Rethinking Orientation: Performativity and Algorithmic Identity

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Dr. Ofri Cnaani is an artist and researcher who works across media and performance. She is a guest professor at TU Wien, Austria and a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam. In 2022 she completed her doctoral studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Cnaani writes about data and coloniality, digital contested heritage, institutional practices in the algorithmic turn, and performance as a model for the creation of critical technology. Cnaani’s work has appeared at the Venice Biennale of Architecture; Tate Britain, UK; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; PS1/MoMA, NYC, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Cnaani recently co-organized Choreographic Devices, a three-day chorographic symposium at ICA, London and is currently working on a project at the International Space Station (ISS).

1. Research File – 1,500 words (or equivalent)

Throughout the summer term, you will work on your journal/research file, which is meant to help you process ideas discussed in class and generate the source material and experimentation needed for your summative project. It will consist of:

2. Final design, spatial or artistic intervention.