rooms + cities

Stephen Bates on Education, Research and Practice

about

The research aim of this studio is to study - by architectural means - the forms and conditions for the eruption of rooms within the fabric of the city. By fabric we mean texture, infrastructure, morphology, topography, zoning even. Rooms may take many forms and scales, they may be big or little, public or private, commercial or residential, habitable or uninhabitable, accessible or inaccessible,…; let us wager that in their many and varied forms, they represent the subject of the city. Imagine for a moment that the city has two surfaces, both of which are problematic. There is an outer surface, the urban rural interface, where city meets countryside; and an inner surface where the space of the subject meets the fabric of the city. Both are problematic, not least because the outer edge no longer exists, and the inner edge never did.

The city is an historically determined product of manual and mental human labour; therefore the form of the city both determines and is determined by subjectivity. We are interested in architecture as a conceptual practice, a site where ideas are condensed and tested and instrumentalised, and that bring with them a culture, an ideology, and an historical purpose.

analysis and critique

Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture as Metalanguage: the critical value of the image, in Theories and History of Architecture (1968)
Mario Gandelsonas, 'From Structure to Subject: The Formation of an Architectural Language, Oppositions 17: 6-29 (1978)
Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings (2008)
Colin St. John Wilson, Architectural Reflections: studies in the philosophy and practice of architecture (1992)
Erno Goldfinger, 'The sensation of space (AR: Nov 1941) Urbanism and spatial order (AR Dec 1941);and The elements of enclosed space (AR Jan 1942)
Roberto Gargiani and Anna Rosellini, ‘Acrobat training: the provocateur of new forms’ in Le Corbusier: Beton Brut and Ineffable Space (1940 - 1965): Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision (2011).

rooms + cities

Pages

Monday, 4 November 2013

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