PARTI* SEMINAR
Laboratory of germinal design documents and study models
Stuckeman School - The Pennsylvania State University
Fall 2014.
Image/imagen: AI WEIWEI, Forever Bicycles, Stainless Steel Bicycles in Gold Gilding, 2013. Photo credits: Philipp Draxler.
OVERVIEW
Parti is an applied course that addresses the early stages of architectural design with emphasis on the manual and conceptual phases of the thought process. Parti deals with sketches, models, and any number of documents or fabrications that are prior to form and to the conventional plans of architecture that describe it. Exposure to examples from modern and contemporary masters is directly followed by student proposals involving their current work. Action and discussion become one in a laboratory where individual contributions undergo collective operations, thus benefiting from externalization and interference. Studio progress is cooperative, profiting from the synergies of compound thinking.
OBJECTIVES
• To broaden the original scope of architectural design through the use of germinal drawings and study models.
• To integrate material fabrications in the architectural cognitive process of analysis, speculation and decision-making.
• To shorten the distance between architectural thought and the documents that generate, inform, and reflect it.
• To blur the boundaries between ideas and objects.
• To explore of the potential of consistent graphic processes that are subject to systematic record.
• To integrate controlled actions and intentional display as substantial stages of architectural design.
• To benefit from collaboration and public discussion of private production.
EXHIBITION
The best results will produce an exhibition at the end of the semester.
CHAPTERS
The course will be divided into six principal themes:
I. The Sketch
II. The Abstract Model
III. The Graphic Function, f(x): The Map & The Diagram
IV. Layers & Series
V. Juxtaposition: The Montage, The Ready-made
VI. Action: The Experiment
PROCEDURES/STRATEGIES
Some of the following will be applied to selected themes and will be subject to discussion and negotiation:
• The mute scale.
• Color as a hierarchical transfer.
• Self-consciousness: the timeline.
• WTF-ness: aiming low (K.Ralske).
• Silence or the verbalism antidote.
• Framing: the title’s conceptual shift.
• The material recipe: cooking the model.
• Drawing the negative, filling up the medium.
• Systems: building the whole from the biased.
• Telephone projects: the rule’s objective test.
• Context reinvented: object/objective come first.
• Radical subtraction: the other’s painless erasure.
• The found object and the assemblage of meaning.
• Flash lab, seeing as an aggressive act (H.Sherman).
• $2 models: the material constriction (J.Baldessari).
• Altered legends: reality’s conjugated configurations.
• Aiming to miss, or getting it exactly wrong (C.Price).
• The light box: building the instrument, not the music.
• Scale change: the minute wall and the gigantic pocket.
• One setting, one variable, 60 seconds black and white video.
• 100 sheets, no eraser: iterations versus self-editing (L.Frantz).
• Geometry of fracture: representation through the broken model.
• 12 frames/30 seconds: description through accumulative variation.
• Integration and derivative formulae: from 1D to 2D, 2D to 3D and vice versa.
• Keeping track of uninterrupted contemplation. Observer, observed (F.Lasserre).
• Imported: like & good / like & bad / dislike & good / dislike & bad (H.Roseman).
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