[1] & [2]
Manifesto and Biograph, our personal stake
In order to assay the personal value of this sensibility, each member of the studio will consider some aspect of his or her own practices, not as autobiography, or self-criticism, or as confessional, but as a two-part personal essay – written, graphic, and architectural – coming to terms with the questions we bring to the support we provide for our lives, coming to terms with dwelling.
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.
[3] 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.
value of each of the first two exercises: 15% and 15%
Monograph, individual and collective
As a way of extending the study's collective and individual literacy, each student will take on a piece of research into architectural history, either as a survey of some phenomenological aspect of the subject, or as an in-depth study of the meaning and character of dwelling, a particular episode, a particular place, a particular time. This will be a scholarly essay, albeit perhaps a wide-ranging and unconventional one, probably richly illustrated, but adhering to the conventions and standards of an M.Arch thesis. The seminar will post these essays as part of a web log devoted to the work of the group.
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.
value of the exercise: 15%
[4] Topograph, the value of a sensibility
So that we are in touch with community, with a real sense of the value of this particular approach, the entire seminar will work together to sketch circumstances that bear the promise of a compelling, beautiful, and useful application of the sensibility existence minimum, explored through research, documentation and analysis.
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.
value of the exercise: 15%
[5]Building, informed by a sensibility
Finally, central to the term's work, each member of the study, working individually or in a small group, will prepare an architectural design for existence minimum. Each will present the designs as a model, supported by documentation that makes each of these designs transparent to a broad public.
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.
value of the exercise: 45%
entire value for the term's work: 105%
entire value for the term's work: 105%
Thesis Counselling: the M1 Studio is a stand-alone studio, not the first term of a student's thesis. There is good reason for this.
Left to their own devices, setting their own working conditions, too many graduate students fall back into what they are already entirely comfortable doing, working out of knowledge already comfortably embodied and unquestioned. This may be one of the reasons so many thesis subjects are so very autobiographical, arising directly out of a student's cultural background – a nation, a faith, a cultural observance, ritual, routine or festival, a particular territory, a special spatial crisis. This does not make these choices the wrong choices, but it does mean that, in making these choices, they challenge students to sublimate, to get outside themselves, or almost inevitably, instead manufacture a personal crisis that burdens the thesis unnecessarily.
The M1 studio models this sublimation, in advance of the thesis itself, and at the same time it is valid work in its own right. Writing, researching, documenting, and design all go in in the studio, preparing a candidate, helping him or her test and exercise several different skills, skills that let the candidate pursue a thesis in whatever way its questions lead.
Throughout the M1 Studio, there will be regular meetings on the question of the thesis, counselling on its design, on the fields of its examination, on its rhetorical stance. These are ungraded, but nevertheless, a crucial part of the process.
Left to their own devices, setting their own working conditions, too many graduate students fall back into what they are already entirely comfortable doing, working out of knowledge already comfortably embodied and unquestioned. This may be one of the reasons so many thesis subjects are so very autobiographical, arising directly out of a student's cultural background – a nation, a faith, a cultural observance, ritual, routine or festival, a particular territory, a special spatial crisis. This does not make these choices the wrong choices, but it does mean that, in making these choices, they challenge students to sublimate, to get outside themselves, or almost inevitably, instead manufacture a personal crisis that burdens the thesis unnecessarily.
The M1 studio models this sublimation, in advance of the thesis itself, and at the same time it is valid work in its own right. Writing, researching, documenting, and design all go in in the studio, preparing a candidate, helping him or her test and exercise several different skills, skills that let the candidate pursue a thesis in whatever way its questions lead.
Throughout the M1 Studio, there will be regular meetings on the question of the thesis, counselling on its design, on the fields of its examination, on its rhetorical stance. These are ungraded, but nevertheless, a crucial part of the process.
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