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Arquitectura Avanzada 
QRO - AD2024


Repair the School / School of Repair:
How will we learn spatial practice in the future?



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Concentración de la Escuela de Arquitectura, Arte y Diseño 
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Laboratorio de Arquitectura Avanzada

Arquitectura Avanzada
QRO - AD2024

Assignment 2:
COLLECTIVE BUILD WORKSHOP: Stuffing the School

Project A due August 12
Project B due August 15
Project C documentation due August 25

OBJECTIVES

  • To develop a position on the future of spatial practices learning through the process of designing with found objects
  • To prototype tools and structures that will enable creative modes of knowledge acquisition in the future


What is the civic responsibility and significance of the architect? As the architectural discipline grapples with its role in resource depletion, carbon emission, and waste generation, how do architects reassert their value while taking responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of their craft?

Architecture students are accustomed to certain spaces of learning: studios, fabrication labs, computer labs, seminar spaces, and more.Though the spaces themselves impact our experience, the “stuff*” that fills these spaces has a significant effect on how we participate in our educational environments. The desks, chairs, and drawing tables in our studios; the pin-up boards and meeting tables that punctuate our seminar spaces; the tools, workbenches, and storage cabinets in our fabrication labs—they all dictate how and what we learn. How can we project toward a better future without first calling into question the stuff—tools, furniture, arrangements—that hold up the status quo? How could the spaces in which we learn, and the stuff that fills them, shift how we operate as spatial practitioners for a more resilient future?

Throughout this two-week collective build workshop, we will consider the typical stuff that fills the spaces of architectural learning and reflect on the modes of practice they enable. We will redesign the “stuff” of architecture schools using found objects. These objects carry with them a rich backstory tied to their initial production and function. When viewed with a surrealist lens, they will bring an unexpected “wild card” to our imaginative and radical ideas about the future of our profession.

Our newly-constructed stuff will translate into imaginative stances on the future direction of architectural learning and practice. Through reorienting our expectations and understandings of architecture as a discipline and as an educational discourse, we will “stuff the school” with odd skills, new forms of collaboration, and unexpected cross-disciplinary pollination.


*Stewart Brand, in his book How Buildings Change, uses the term “stuff” to refer to anything in a building that isn’t fixed and changes out monthly or yearly.


Project A: HOW TO MAKE AN OBJECTILE 


Objects can be thought of as having lives. They are “born” when they are created, undergo different “events” in their usage, and “die” when they are disposed of. Anthropomorphizing these objects and vividly recounting their “biographies” enhances our understanding of the interactions between objects and people, revealing more about their broader cultural significance.

The problem is that, with the efficient industrial manufacturing of objects and mindless disposal practices, most objects are currently perceived as being single-use. When we don’t like or need them anymore, they go into the landfill.

Design can create new futures for objects that would otherwise die. By altering an object to give it a new use, designers have the power to give them new meaning and new life, saving them from the landfill. In this exercise, we will collectively design multiple lives for each of the objects you brought in. We challenge you to retain some traces of its past life even as you alter it for its next life, so that it is perceptible to anyone who encounters it that this is a reincarnation; this is a special object that has traveled through time and defied death. We will call these objectiles, or object-projectiles: objects that are on an adventure across time and space to collect multiple uses and lives.

Suggestions for what types of objects to bring in:
  • You should be able to carry it
  • It should be made of a material we can safely cut/drill/etc into in the shop (like wood or plastic). That being said, don’t bring in anything you don’t feel comfortable with altering.
  • It can have a function, or it can be function-less.
  • Most importantly, it should have a personality.

Activity, before the first round:

Establish the existing life of the object. What are the formal, material, textural, cultural, or aesthetic qualities that establish the purpose of the object that you have found? How much of that meaning is part of the physical nature of that object, and how much has been ascribed by society, tradition, and habit?

Activity x three rounds:

Each object will undergo three rounds of alterations. As in a game of “exquisite corpse”, you will pass your altered object to the next person at the end of each round, for it to be altered again and gain its next life.

Using methods of alteration, assembly, and construction, change the function or disposition of your object. Does it stand still now? Make it wobble. Is it purposefully slick? Find a way to make it grippy. What are the operations that can alter the function and meaning of this object, while still retaining traces of its past life? Can you create a sense of humor, irony, or absurdity between the past use and the future use?

Possible methods of assembly/alteration:
  • Cut into
  • Remove segments
  • Sand down
  • Drill holes
  • Chisel into
  • Fasten to another object
  • Create a new structure
  • Add legs
  • Give a new base/orientation

Activity after each round:

Photograph the objectile. What do you call this objectile? What is the new use of your objectile? Perform it. How easy is it to still read traces of this objectile’s past?



Project B: SCENES FROM A FUTURE SCHOOL


Richard McGuire, Here


What skills and learning objectives do we take for granted in our current schooling systems? How can we insert experimental ideas into the techniques and methods we learn in architecture school?

While Project A focused on physical experimentation at a one-to-one scale, many of the tools of the architect are representational, such as renderings, drawings, collages, and models. Image-making is a way of projecting a future that we desire. In Project B, you will be crafting a gif, made out of a sequence of still images, that will set the scene for the future of architectural education.

We will start by collectively brainstorming a list of skills that we believe future schools should teach and value. The skills can be open-ended, pulled from other disciplines, or represent central tenets in design education. We will document our stock of found objects and learn how to photograph, scan, model, trace and otherwise “get to know” them.

With this bank of future skills and found objects to draw from, each of you will combine them into SKILL X OBJECT equations of your choosing to set your scenes. Consider the types of scenes these combinations might produce, how the objects may play a role in enabling future skill sets, and what modes of learning might result.

Example of SKILL X OBJECT equations:
  • Image 1: to use biomaterials  X  triangular steel frame
  • Image 2: to learn restoration techniques  X  (plastic L-shaped bracket thing with notches + plastic PVC pipe with holes)
  • Image 3: (to collect + to promote changes in harmful laws)  X  purple surface with legs
  • Image 4: to deconstruct  X  (purple surface with legs + planks of wood)  .

It’s important that the images relate to each other throughout the gif. They can be 4 totally different scenes as long as each image in sequence shares some connecting thread by showcasing the same object, skill, or context from one image to the next.

You can also chose to focus on 1 skill combined with multiple objects / contexts / moments in time.
  • To begin the construction of your scenes, bring your object into photoshop and remove the background.
  • Digitally in Photoshop, start layering in entourage, characters, alternative backgrounds, and other found objects to best illustrate your equations.
  • In addition to the objects we have on hand, you are encouraged to search the internet, publications, catalogs, archives, and 3D model websites for more objects and characters outside of the architectural discipline in order to “stuff” your scenes with new skills.
  • You’ll use photoshop to build your collages, however, you can import drawings and sketches that you’ve photographed or scanned into your digital collage. 
  • We encourage you to incorporate at least one analog method into your digital collage. 
  • Produce at least 4, or as many scenes as you feel necessary to tell your story in your gif.


Tutorials we will do in class:
  • Photogrammetry and clean-up in photoshop
  • 3D scanning and clean-up of the digital model in Rhino
  • How to make a gif in photoshop
  • Easy Rhino Rendering/Enscape to bring into a collage

Deliverables Schedule:

Before 9am Wednesday:
  • Post to your Arena drafts of 4(+) scenes & corresponding equations

Wednesday morning, we’ll have a Progress Pin-Up

Before 9am Thursday - Final Deliverables due:
  • Export a looping gif made up of at least four images that tell the story of the future school
  • Print out 4 key frames on 8.5x11/carta/letter-sized paper
  • Additional homework: read Theory of the Quasi-Object.



Project C: STUFFING THE SCHOOL


Now that we have speculated on the skills that are important for future spatial practitioners to learn, and the types of physical spaces, objects, and tools that these new forms of learning require, we will collectively design and build the “stuff” that supports new forms of architectural education.

As a class, we will collectively co-author a super-furniture that will serve as the site for developing the skills required to construct a better future. The skills for the future that we have been brainstorming and exploring over the last few days will guide the development of our designs.

Together we’ll construct this large-scale “stuff” using found objects, salvaged materials, and additional materials when necessary. At the end of next week, we will share our construction with the campus, hosting an open event to demonstrate its uses and celebrate our collective work. 

  1. As a class, we’ll collectively brainstorm the skills we want to build for.
  2. We’ll break into groups of 3 based on what future skills we are interested in. Each group will focus on 1 future skill.
  3. Each group will charrette ideas and bring 1 communal proposal to class on Friday morning.
  4. Friday, we will collectively work to design the 3 proposals into 1 piece of Super-Stuff.

Guidelines for this first charette:
  • Your super-furniture should be able to support 9 users at one time.
  • The users don’t all need to be human! And they don’t all need to be using it in the same way.
  • It should support the learning of your future skill of focus
  • Use your imagination :-) It should look like a piece of furniture/structure we have not seen before.
  • It should be buildable by our class in one week!

Deliverables for Friday Aug 16 9am for each group:
  • A name for your super-furniture and an explanation of what types of learning it supports and how
  • Drawings, sketches, and/or diagram showing what your proposal looks like in axonometric view.
  • Some idea of scale (show scale figures in your drawings)
  • A list of physical characteristics of the materials you would need to construct it (Ex: soft, rigid, structural sticks, planar surface, interlockable)
  • Optional: A Rhino model and supplementary drawings.


Each group should consider:
  • What activities and ways of learning does your super-furniture support? Do those activities require external elements?
  • Is it designed for individual activity, collaboration, or a combination of both?
  • Does it need to have proximities in order to be functional? (Ex: It needs to fit in a doorway, it needs to face a South-facing wall, etc)
  • Is it designed to change over time, or even seasonally?
  • Is there a certain time of day when it’s activated? Night, morning, when the light is at a certain angle?
  • Is it meant to be mobile or deployable, as in, intended to be brought out of the classroom and into other sites?
  • Does it fulfill one use at one time or is it multipurpose?
  • Is it designed so that it is accessible to all bodies?
  • Does it have attachments or components that alter its use?
  • How is it challenging or re-directing the ways in which we learn?
  • What skills, and relating infrastructure, does it bring in from other disciplines?
  • If it is sited outdoors, does it incorporate protection from the elements?
  • Does it have a clear use or is it more open-ended? Both directions are valuable. Parts of it can have a prescribed use, and parts can be open to interpretation.


Summary of schedule:

  • Thursday: Introduce Project C and begin design charette
  • Friday: Continue design charette, pick a design, and make a building plan (a clear list of goals/schedule)
  • Monday: Gather materials (both found objects and new materials), start building, de-construction if needed
  • Tuesday: Build
  • Wednesday: Build
  • Thursday: Last day of building
  • Friday: Final touches, documentation, and celebration! 🥳

FINAL SUBMISSION due midnight August 25

STUDENT PHOTOS FOLDER LINK
Please upload your photos from the two weeks of the workshop here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kUzbDLzVQ8ir23MT0rErht1FBt5tkkr-?usp=sharing

DELIVERABLES
As this was a collective project, everyone in the class will contribute to its documentation. Each of you will be responsible for one of the following pieces of documentation. In the spirit of collectivity and co-authorship, we’ll all share our files with each other. Please submit both on Canvas and on Arena.

  1. (2 person team) As-built drawing set of the table including
    1. Plan cutting through the bins (~60cm above the ground)
    2. Elevation(s)
    3. Section
    4. “Roof plan” showing the view of the table from above

  2. (1 person) GIF of illustrative drawings (can be line drawing, collage, digitally modeled, etc) of all the different uses of the table in top view (“roof plan”)

  3. (1 person) GIF of illustrative drawings (can be line drawing, collage, digitally modeled, etc) of all the different uses of the table (especially storage) in section view

  4. (1 person) GIF of axonometric assembly and disassembly drawings - how the table is taken apart and put back together again

  5. (1 person) Material stories: an illustrative site plan showing where all the objects came from on campus and off (Home Depot, that pile of theater trash, etc) and the path they took to become part of the table

  6. (1 person) Skills for the Future Illustrations: Mini-story posters of how “Collaborating” and “Unbuilding” skills could be applied as future architects

  7. (2 person team) Material stories: character “identity cards” or “baseball cards” for each of the six found materials (stair, purple bin, pvc tubes, metal triangles, podium). On the front, show its past life as an object. On the back, show its new life as part of the table.



REFERENCES