The Blue Exercises are entirely individual exercises. The Yellow Exercises are collaborative. The last exercise – Building – is an individual exercise in which each member of the studio makes a particular contribution to the group effort, beginning with a good deal of group work settling issues of site and program, and concluding with the collective publication of the work. As a suite of exercises, they are designed to test and develop several of the skills – researching and reflecting, recovering your own thoughts, documenting places and events, integrating information and generating new information, writing and editing, framing a narrative or argument, consolidating a rhetorical format, presenting difficult material effectively, and of course, designing – that a candidate needs to bring to an architectural thesis.
Manifesto is a small, relatively elegant architectural problem. Each student takes a particular climate (his or her own choice) and a particular situation (again by choice). Both the setting and situation should have a bearing on the form of the final exercise. In that site and situation, each student should design a dwelling, deliberately applying any particular paradigm of production – pre-fabricated, dry assembled, built with found materials, built in situ over months or a day, mobile – of no more than seventy-five cubic meters (net, and approximate), designed to accommodate two to four people. The project should be presented as a model 1:10 full scale, any materials, with subdued colors, and supplementary drawings, cartoons, or sketches. This is a manifesto, not the answer to a problem. No explanation of it is required, no rational is necessary. Only the act of the building itself matters here.
Biograph is the second of these two, very personal opening exercises. It is a biographic sketch of intellectual development, with almost all the pitfalls – false detachment, self-agrandisement, post-rationalization, denial – that any intellectual biography has. In order to treat with these dangers, the authors are asked to write them in three parts (in any order): a place, a time, and a thing (obviously any scale). The biograph may be (very likely should be) copiously-illustrated, with for instance, images, maps, charts, timelines, technical drawings, sketches, and so on. This is, inevitably, a personal essay. In it, we anticipate that the author will be looking out from a particular position that we will come to know, sharing his or her sense of the world, rather than in, sharing unnecessary details of a personal life. As a piece of writing, it could be judged in several ways: by the voice, by the quality of the insights, by the ways in which the three-fold theme is brought together, but the depth of the authority and the acuteness of the empirical observation. In this case, the form of the insight is as important as the apparent content.
Monograph is the third exercise, and takes place over the same time as the first two exercises – the first half of the term. Monograph is an outward-looking exercise, the document a particular episode – for instance, a building, an exhibition, a publication, a teaching programme, a body of work, a manifesto, even an image – in the long and varied career of existence minimum, in it's many forms. The monograph should be fully-illustrated – again, images, maps, charts, timelines, technical drawings, sketches, and so on.
The monograph tests the author's skill in developing new information from existing material. This is an act of interpolation which, in many ways, is central to the effort. Successful work will demonstrate a mastery of the research material, an effective control of the voice, and as we've said, the development of fresh material from out of the existing.
Topograph, the fourth exercise, is a consideration of site, in this case, sectors of the City of Port au Prince, Haiti. The work will begin concurrent with the first three exercises, but it goes past their conclusion, into the last exercise, Building. This is a collaborative exercise, where the seminar works on one problem: from a distance, in straightened circumstances, develop a richly developed, cultural and physical topograph of a suitable building site or sites, together with their situation.
Building is the final exercise of the term, the culmination of the term's work. The conditions of building, the site, and the situation will develop out of the earlier work.
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