LFU:online

Students are able to master integrative design and planning tasks. They can independently and reflectively formulate an architectural concept, connect it with the discourse and implement it on different scales. They have specific methodological knowledge and skills for the integration of aesthetic, functional, programmatic, urban, typological, technical and environmental aspects.

Style as imitation and excess

This studio will explore architecture through the lens of style and folly. Follies—pagodas in gardens, ornamental towers on estates, extravagant pavilions—have always been playful and excessive, yet also serious: small enough to serve as experiments, symbolic enough to stage big questions. From the pagoda at Kew Gardens to Coop Himmelblau’s deconstructivist folly in Osaka, they define the spectrum of folly as an architectural idea, up to the present.

In the first semester, each of you will work with two follies, changing their styles on a rotating basis: deconstructivist and modernist, postmodernist and sustainable. Through this process, you will create an atlas of contemporary styles producing drawings and a series of models. Alongside your design work, and as important, you will write an essay on style, tracing its shifting meaning from eighteenth-century theory to its roles in fashion, pop culture, and identity today.

In the second semester, our focus will move from isolated follies to the landscapes that hosted them: gardens, castles, estates, cemeteries. You will study the political, social, and cultural conditions that generated these places, how those conditions have changed, and how they have transformed into markets, malls, places for tourism, and new infrastructures. Working in pairs, you will reimagine these sites through speculative visions expressed in conceptual models and drawings according to today’s issues. Each pair will define its own focus—political, ecological, or aesthetic—and rethink the chosen site from a contemporary perspective, developing both a speculative vision (drawing, model) and a research book, looking into the specificities of the site, its transformations, its political and cultural implication on a wider scale. For example, if you work on a garden, your research questions may be: how has the garden changed? how has our relationship to nature changed? How can we rethink it?

The book will contain the atlas of follies and the essays on style; and a developed research thesis that reimagines a historic site through the lens of contemporary concerns and your own research interests.

Course examination according to § 6, statute section on "study-law regulations".

Will be discussed in the first lesson.