‘The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.’ Robert Bresson
As with an iceberg, what you see is not what you get. Everything has a hidden aspect, an internal logic or system or mechanism that is richer than the outwardly projected image. The aim of the unit is to work on the notion of an iceberg and to identify latent agendas that will subsequently inform and allow for the development of spatial and tectonic propositions. Questioning the underlying ethical basis of formal architectural design intent based on assurances of amelioration and improvement, the scope of the year was to elicit the various subversive conditions that are inherent within architecture. Subversion was sought through analysing side effects, exploring the allegorical, augmenting the degenerate or speculating on future manifestations of the complexities of contemporary social and cultural conditions in the developed world.
The structure of the year was divided into two phases: research and production. In the first phase, students worked individually to build up their body of references and their personal definition of a design agenda. Among this corpus, the specific themes and subjects explored through the research included spatial explorations for the nuclear culture elderly, voyeurism in contemporary metropolises, degenerative relationships of mutual symbiosis and parasitism, the malignant aspects of exclusive tourism and issues of metabolism and resource scarcities. At the end of this phase students produced an ‘artefact’ – taking the form of a text, a film, an object, a performance or some other abstract design project – that expressed their full understanding of the iceberg as metaphor. In the second phase, students designed an architectural project using the preceding theory as a paradigm.
Unit Staff
Didier Faustino
Kostas Grigoriadis
Students
Dimitri Chaava
Suram Choi
Artemis Doupa
Saif Lassas
Ryan Phanphesophon
Anna Pipilis
Kayvan Sarvi
Natalia Sherchenkova
Danecia Sibingo
Marilia Spanou
Wen Ying Teh
Gustav Toftgård
Kassymkhan Ulykbanov
Thanks to
Charles Arsène-Henry
Peter Karl Becher
Valentin Bontjes van Beek
Roberto Bottazzi
Edouard Cabay
Javier Castañón
Mollie Claypool
Kate Davies
Ryan Dillon
Christina Doumpioti
Shin Egashira
Marie-Hélène Fabre
Maria Fedorchenko
Kenneth Fraser
Pedro Gadanho
Efrén García Grinda
Evan Greenberg
Karsten Huneck
Rosario Hurtado
Tobias Klein
Theo Lalis
Iain (Max) Maxwell
Eduardo McIntosh
Alexandra Midal
Ricardo de Ostos
Ann-Sofi Rönnskog
Theodore Spyropoulos
Brett Steele
Naiara Vegara
Carlos Villanueva Brandt
Andrew Yau
Liam Young
Building an Iceberg