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Diploma 2 - Building An Iceberg
Didier Faustino and Kostas Grigoriadis

‘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