guest professor @ woodbury university (los angeles) fall 2009
'Haptic Atmospheres'
Instructors: Tanja Kullack / Matthew Gillis
Course Overview
This course is a collaborative studio between the Interior Architecture(IA) department and Architecture(AR) department students at Woodbury University. By integrating the two departments, the studio will develop an interdisciplinary approach to design research, strategies, and implementation of a mixed use housing complex in the Los Angeles region.
Course Agenda
“As a consequence of its formal ideals, the architecture of our time is usually creating settings for the eye which seem to originate in a single moment of time and evoke the experience of flattened temporality. Vision places us in the present tense, whereas haptic experience evokes the experience of a temporal continuum.”
Juhani Pallasmaa, “Hapticity And Time”. The Architectural Review, May 2000.
Despite its role as defining the overall aesthetic of a work, art, a surrounding influence, or environment, atmosphere can be a productive and effective interface for architecture. “Haptic Atmospheres” attempts to choreograph experiments in step with critiquing the sensual and performative aspects of everyday-life through the temporality of cinematographic techniques. Rather than translating emotive conditions into a singular photographic technique, the studio will develop a cinematic approach to materializing the effectual into a narrative of form, space, and time.
Cinematographic concepts are introduced as a matter of analysis, perception and communication of architectureat the same time the strong relationship between architecture and film in terms of structure, composition and organization is emphasized.
Areas of Investigation and Intervention:
- Atmosphere – the condition of architectural production and
reception.
- Housing – the space where architectural and socio-cultural
conventions meet and consolidate.
- Everyday Life – where mass culture is individualized and
becomes daily routine.
- Interface – the discursive space that connects and separates
bodies, spaces and thoughts simultaneously
- Film – simulating and representing life, space, form and time.
- Frame / Perspective / Mise-En-Scène – as a matter of
narration.
Course Project
The focus of the studio will be on the role of interfacing urbanity and reconsidering the space of “Everyday Life”. The vehicle for these investigations will be a mixed use housing complex located near a transit hub in the Burbank. This complex, which will consist of residential units, a series of gathering spaces, a commercial/retail hospitality space(s) and parking, will engage with multiple publics and diverse itineraries.
The initial investigations and experimentations will catalyze unforeseen architectural formations allowing students opportunity to challenge the conventions of program, planning, and construction. The studio will approach architectural production with students working in pairs, one IA student and one AR student. The execution of this studio will be highly collaborative throughout the entirety of the semester.
Interdisciplinarity
“Haptic Atmosphere’s” intention is to lure students out of their majors, to give them an opportunity to discover new perspectives and strategies and to then apply this knowledge and these new ideas in their specialty fields. Thus, what is proclaimed as well as practiced is the training of experts in the original sense of the word. If we consider the Latin root of “expert” (exportare: to carry forth), we see that experts differ from specialists to the extent that experts disseminate expertise to those in other fields in order to provide them with a fresh impetus that can be of use to them in their specialized field or which provides them with an aspect that expands their very definition of their discipline.
The complexity and multi-layered nature of the task involved calls for a range of “experts” who work jointly on a project, whereby the focus is on the process itself and on individual ideas. In accordance with this, an experiment is launched by a team taking leave of specialization and focusing on the process itself.
This also brings about a change in the participants’ conception of self. They cease defining their task within the framework of a pre-scribed area of responsibility and discrete artistic, architectural and technical disciplines, and instead proceed on the basis of substantive objectives in order to apply their individual means and capabilities to the successful completion of the respective project.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The studio intent is to explore and test architectural design as it relates to one or more special contemporary issues. The studio is open to both 4th and 5th year students. An equivalent summer studio may be substituted for AR 491, Design Studio 5A: Contemporary Topics Studio. Studio, twelve hours a week.
Course Framework
The semester will be split into the following (3) phases:
I. Ecologies of Sense (Investigation and analysis)
• Atmospheric experiments will influence the conceptual
development of the program and function
• Site Analysis including quantitative and qualitative
explorations/representations
• Atmospheric / Site Multi-Media Footage
• Site Model and Site Drawing(s) production
II. Landscapes of Intimacy and Participation (Team project development)
• Program Analysis and Experimentation
Strategic Concept Investigations
• Concept Footage
• Concept Model(s) and Concept Drawing production
III. Images of Matter (Team project implementation)
• Assemblage / Tectonic Tactics
• Temporal Narrative(s) Footage
• Project Mode, Project Drawing(s), and Assemblage/
Tectonic Drawing(s) production
Course Reader
Atmosphere (in excerpts)
• Holl, Steven. Questions of Perception. William K Stout
Publishers; 2007
• Lavin, Furjan, Dean. Crib Sheets, Monacelli, 2005
• Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin Great Britain:
Wiley - Academy, 2005
• Zumthor, Peter. Thinking Architecture. Birkhäuser Basel;
2006
• Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres. Birkhäuser Basel; 2006
• Joy Monice Malnar, Frank Vodvarka. Sensory Design.
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Housing (in excerpts)
• Gausa, Manual and Salazar, Jaime. Housing: New
Alternative, New Systems. Princeton Architectural Press,
1998.
• Atelier Kempe Thill. Specific Neutrality, a manifesto for
new Collective Housing. A+T / Density II
• Xavier Gonzales. Barbies new Clothes. A+T / Density III
• Clare Cooper, Wendy Sarkissan. Housing as if People
Mattered. University California Press 1988
Interface (in excerpts)
• Corner, James. The Agency of Mapping: Speculation,
Critique and Invention,”Denis Cosgrove,ed., Mappings.
London: Reaktion Books, 1999.
• Lewis, Paul and Tsurmaki, Marc and Lewis, David.“
SNAFU” Situation Normal, Pamphlet Architecture 21.
Princeton Architectural Press, 1998
Film (in excerpts)
• Encyclopedia of CinematicTerms
• David Bordwell, Kristin Thomson. Film-Art. Mc Graw-Hill
Professional, 2008
Everyday Life (in excerpts)
• Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life.
University of California Press
• George Perec. Species of Spaces and other Pieces.
Penguin Classics, 1998
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