Teaching Portfolio

Staedelschule Architecture Class

2014 - Ongoing

 

The projects in this portfolio are organized by the academic year, and each image belongs to one of 3 rubrics:

1. Visual Studies

2. Software (Platform Sandbox customizations)

3. Final Project

 

The pedagogical motivation behind these projects is an interest in contemporary formats of software-based image making and their entanglement with architectural design. The pedagogical project, as well as the resulting student works, belongs to the tradition of medium-specific graphical reorigination of design methods, in the vein of Hejduk, Tschumi, Liebeskind and Eisenman. Our predecessors were working with flat mediums and the problems of graphic space (collage, superposition, montage) in order to overturn the hegemony of perspectivalism and establish a new design space, a new platform for their work. Our work centers around software-specific visual problems of volume, zoom, depth and the multiplicity of views and grounds. The workings of chance are, as they have been in the past, always present in their capacity to disrupt and reorganize the playfield, although they now go by different names - randomness, fake physics, leaky simulations, AI.

Another crucial area of inquiry is a focus on difficult images, something we call High-Definition Abstraction, images that do not lend themselves to easy interpretation. Agglomerations, aggregations, loose wholes, collections of partial figures, heaps and fragments. Images that operate and do their work before conceptualization, thus preventing conceptual transparency or nostalgic framing. Images that engender their own formats and sites. Images as objects and objects as images. Images that leak into reality as invaders but do not overstay their welcome.

An important area of interest is the specificity of the digital objects, an inqury into the particularities of digital objects, and ways that these difficult objects can (re)enter the disipline of architecture.

 

 

SAC First Year Group, 2017-18

Students: Panagis Marketos, Suyong Ko, Amelia Marek, Haewook Jeong, Chiraag Punjabi, YeonJoo Oh, Soonam Lee, Gencay Derbentogullari, Prateek Bajpai, Soubhi Baraghit, Aruna Das, Mijail Franulic Sippa, Jun Eui Song, Andre Zakhia.

 

Visual Studies

HD Abstraction.

Translations from flat to volumetric, from image to object, from painting to form.

 

 

 

SAC Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, 2016-17

Students: Yara Feghali, Viviane Komati, Miriam Kuhlman, Vamsi Vemuri, Madhu Shankar, Jayakar Priyadharshan.

Final Projects.

Computer vision, neural networks, AI, storytelling, worldbuilding.

 

 

SAC First Year Group, 2016-17

Students: Shuruq Tramontini, Natalya Voinova, Darhan Rajendra, Roberto Barbosa, Sarath Saitongin, Anna Arlyapova, Roberto Saldana, Leyla Aghayeva, Jose Luis Reynoso, Isha Pundir, Eda Tekirli, Zi Yi Chua, Kishan Kumar, Mahima Koteshwar, Omer Kirazoglu, Subin Jameel.

 

Visual Studies

Translations from flat to volumetric, from image to object, from painting to form.

 

 

 

Software - Platform Sandbox v.2 customizations

Create architectural assemblages by sampling and mixing digital readymades.

Part 2 of an ongoing exploration of alternative design software.

Platform Sandbox v. 2 full page.

 

 

Final Projects

A collection of small public buildings.

 

 

SAC First Year Group, 2015-16

Students: Yara Feghali, Nistha Mehra, Rebecca Nayagam, Vamsi Vemuri, Viviane Komati, Apoorva Shankar, Madhu Shankar, Saba Sedaghati, Lida Badafreh, Eyad Tarek.

In October 2016, Form magazine published an extensive interview about these projects.

 

Final Projects

 

Proposal for a University on the Island of Poveglia:

"We refuse to build on the island and to participate in the politics of gentrification. We believe that the utopian project of architecture is dead, which is the precise reason for reinventing it. Our aim is to preserve the magic and the stories, and invent new ones. We propose a platform with 33 buildings, encircling the island, fulfilling the requested programme. The island becomes an oasis, and the buildings take the role of strange Venetian characters congregating for a Bal Masqué.

The real is a strange place, get over it."

 

Software - Platform Sandbox v.1 customizations

Create architectural assemblages by sampling and mixing digital readymades.

Part 1 of an ongoing exploration of alternative design software.

Platform Sandbox v.1 full page.

 

 

 

Visual Studies

High Definition Abstraction.

Production of high resolution 'style templates'.

 

 

The Foundation: