As a final result, we presented individual works on the chosen architectural theory as a comic movie and booklet which will together form the MAS 2012 Comix Series ANY OF ALL.
At the same time, we analysed how the technological conditions for different times have affected specific architectural manifestos and theories.
Find the students’ work here:
Through visiting the Werner Oechslin library in Einsiedeln, students had the opportunity to get into the astonishing world constructed by integrating the unique books.
What could be more fantastical, of more consequence, than building a new city? Or a new house? Hunting a hog or ploughing a field is easy
enough, you can follow a natural order. But building a new city? That’s pure imagination, pure virtuality. On a small, carefully chosen and defined plot of land, a city can be anything we want it to be. There, in that particular abstraction of territory, there are no qualitative boundaries, except those set by our own imagination, which in turn has been shaped over time by the rhythms of the fields that lie under the sun.
Today, thus our contention, it is no longer the cultivation of fields that is being visualised and whose surpluses find articulation in the cities. Through information technology it is our cities themselves that are being cultivated. Today we look for virtualisations and architectural articulations on a new plateau. What, then, are the imaginings, the thought patterns that are being shown to us by Vitruvius, Palladio, Ledoux, Durand, Semper, Loos,
Wright, Corbusier, Sullivan, Rossi, Krier, Ungers, Alexander, Otto, Venturi, Eisenman, Libeskind, Hadid, Gehry, Lynn, Herzog & de Meuron, Zumthor, Koolhaas? What are the virtualities, what the urbanities described by deconstructivism, structuralism, post-structuralism, minimalism, functionalism, international style, modernity, postmodernism, existentialism, phenomenology, behaviourism, positivism, vitalism?
Let’s cultivate these ideas for our new architecture and our new cities.
As a first task, we all presented our architectural heroes with aim to get into the world of their imaginings and thought patterns. Starting with context where they were situated, we tried to find, analyze and summarize the major concepts of their theory. Research raised further disquisition and proportion question in order to reconstruct how The Architectural Whole has been articulated by our heroes. Learning from their experience we are starting to develop our own attitude.
BITS AS ANY-UNITS PUT IN PROPORTION WITH PROPORTION AND RATIO
Every building practice needs a smallest unit to bring things into proportion and controllable relations. Traditionally, these units are derived by setting some defined magnitude as elementray. The paradigmatic example is the so called column modules in the Art of Greek Temple Building, from which the ratio can be derived and declinated across scales to put the whole building into proportions. Today we are working with computers, where the elementary units are bits. Bits are the kind of units which render information into a technologically handable quantity. Yet bits are literally speaking a very strange thing – looked at within the language game of quantities, they are finite formal units of determinacity, or pure determinability. Hence we will call them Any-Bits, or Intensive Quantities. How exactly can they be thought to fit within the language game of quantities, magnitudes, numbers?
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