At the present time of globalization, the identity-modernity dialectic reappears, though in a different way to how it was addressed in our recent past.
On the one hand we have the defence of the specific, the local, of landscapes that are perhaps not so diverse but, like the climate, permanently...
We are dealing with fire in a very specific spot: the island of Stromboli, Europe’s last permanently active volcano. Here, we are going to relate to fire in three ways.
First, as a physical presence, as a phenomenon that can be intellectually analysed or sensually perceived. Through...
Our mission is, of course, to teach people to design: to imagine in physical terms a new reality and, further, to be able to make it possible, to build it.
My interest is more methodological - abstract, instrumental - than stylistic and is situated between awareness of the student’s freedom of...
The relatively little known PREVI project is important for several reasons. First of all, it was set in the context of the overall logic of the informal city. The self-constructed city, comprising houses built by their occupants, played a major role at the time, especially in that particular...
Read moreThe last semester we were involved in a project that tried to connect literature – written knowledge – with architecture. Of course, knowledge has been transmitted until very recently or until now by books, by letters, by printed forms invented in the Renaissance. So, the fact that books have...
Read moreThe relationship between cinema & architecture is mentioned in many occasions and it's partially true. In fact, the architecture in the cinema appears as a background of the scene, as a background of the action. As, happens with photography, the cinema is giving us a specific point of view...
Read moreOur Giacometti project deals with a very important question that is the meaning of the word context. What is a context? Which is the context?
Of course the context is connected with the physical facts, with the geography, the topography, with the climate, the snow, the temperature and also...
In architecture, designing and constructing mean implementing a way of thinking with a view to action in an active relation with the changing conditions of the contemporary world. From our position in academia, in terms of our pedagogical practice (the place where Architectural Papers are produced),...
Read morePAINTING WITH AIR
At an artistic level, the picture could be painted with the remains of the sky;
making the enclosure ready to receive and...
DANGER & DEBILITY
Fire certainly can be dangerous and out of control, destructive and aggressive.
In these conditions, architecture can...
We try to teach how to design, how to produce, how to think and make buildings happen. For me, this is closely connected to the dialectic between concept (abstract conditions) and matter (physical conditions). This kind of synthetic duality is the starting point of our profession, in which an idea...
Read moreIsabelle Ramseier
The project derives from the typology of the ruins. A ruin generally keep contact to the earth. The more distant part as the roof...
Dubai has, in our recent past, been a paradigm of both possibility and delirium. Eulogized by the ever-present messiahs of modernity, whose jaded voices once again announced their tired proclamations of a supposed creative apocalypse; reviled by moralistic social leftist critics, constructive events...
Read moreModels and images are tools or instruments that provoke the transport or passage of abstract ideas to physical reality.
MODELS
1 Volume
All buildings have a volume, some kind of shape or sculptural presence with a certain definition of the relations between voids and mass. In...
PROCESS
Constructing a building can be a long process. This is one of those cases.
OPEN SELECTION. SUMMER 2004
The first step was to produce some brief reflections. On the basis of these, plus curriculum and similar documents, the Jury selected five teams.
My initial interest was in...
Could you talk about the relationship between your academic activity and your professional practice? In what way do they influence each other?
I consider myself a professional architect. Having said that, I have to point out that this has not always been the case. At the start of my career...
JLLM The first question is about the dialectic between the terms identity
and modernity. The typical understanding of modernity is the creation
of a kind of layer that is added to a place. For instance, Rem
Koolhaas’s ideas about China twenty years ago again introduced
this excitement about...
1 Idea and Matter
Our mission is to teach students to design—that is, to imagine, in physical terms, a new reality, and then to know how to make it possible, construct it.
My interest is more methodological—that is, abstract or conceptual—than stylistic or formal, and it...