Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes |
For this first semester, FS19, we will work with GYPSUM, as part of our six-year MATERIAL GESTURE research and design. Our interest starts from a geological understanding of mining our source materials and consequently its irreversible changing of the environment. Geology has its own entropy, where everything is gradually wearing down, as we can see in the beautiful Karst landscapes where gypsum is naturally dissolving. However with the mining of our building materials, such as gypsum, we change our environment in a very different way with open mining, quarries and its related infrastructure. In order to build, we mine and therefore we work in parallel on two sides, the sourcing of our material and the construction with it.
Gypsum is widely used within the realm of architecture, either as part of the process of making architecture, or in constructing architecture itself, such as the mass production today of plaster, gypsum board and building blocks. Gypsum has been used since the ancient Egyptians as a painted plaster finish inside the pyramids and as a structural material for the mortar in between the large stone blocks. Some researchers believe it was even used as a complete structural material by casting the building blocks in gypsum itself.
As a prototyping material gypsum is used for model making: think of Vincent de Rijk’s famous positive and negative cast models of the Très Grandes Bibliotheque for OMA, or Christian Kerez’s recent Incidental Space for the Venice Architecture Biennial, for which he started with casting amorphous substances in gypsum, as a way of spatial form-finding.
We can find gypsum as a casting material for ceramics, glass, bronze or aluminum; and outside of architecture the material is widely used for example as an addiment in the food industry and in agriculture as a fertilizer. At the ETH, several researches have been conducted that involve gypsum as their main topic or where it is as an important material to support laboratory experiments. At the Institute for Building Materials, chemical engineers study gypsum crystal growth at a molecular scale to inform the development of building technologies. The Magnetically Assisted Slip Casting, which uses a 100-year-old manufacturing technique in combination with contemporary material research to create complex materials that are almost perfect imitations of their natural models.
When we take all its aspects of the material in consideration: the geology, the mining, its different properties, the craftsmanship, the specialised techniques and the cultural significance, we can deploy the full potential of the inherent qualities of the material itself and our way of working it, in what we call MATERIAL GESTURE. We will define our gestures of making and working material(s) in which gypsum is as a key element, in order to produce an architecture, where the reality of the work lays within the materiality, the space, and the act of making. The architecture that results from this approach does not reference or represent something, but simply attempts to exist as a physical reality.
Richard Serra’s VERB list is a beautifully rich summary of all manipulations, all gestures, we can apply to matter. He made this list at the same time he made one of his most fascinating works in which he casted the corners of an exhibition space by throwing fluid lead in it – to splash. The final form resulted from a process of making. |
Lernziele |
The project you will develop in this studio is based on the research and free explorations in the material aspects and ways of making (gestures). You are asked to make a design and model of a building in the actual proposed and tested material(s) in which gypsum is a key element.
In our studio we will work in a workshop and laboratory like setting where you research, design and test the actual proposed material of your project. The material and the ways of making are not a presentation outcome of the design studio, but are an integral part of a process of working, researching and designing. In the design studio you will work individually.
For the final presentation a physical model of your building, or a fragment of it, in scale 1 to 15 is required that shows the material and the gestures (the ways of making). This is the key element of your presentation as well as samples of the material research. Next to the model, portrait A2 sheets with the material gesture research, drawings of the project and photos of the model are requested. |
