SPECIALIZATIONS, INSIGHTS, EXPERIMENTATIONS: SPATIAL INVESTIGATIONS

Specific Foundation / Core

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

Particular emphasis is placed on encouraging the development of personal design vocabularies, portraying flexibility and resourcefulness in responding to complex spatial requirements. Students will be challenged to a continuous processing of their design proposal through the use of advanced spatial documentation and representational tools, digital and physical models, which may be conceptual, diagrammatic and not necessarily representational.

The course’s object is the research on the procedure of architectural design and the investigation of its origins and its limits. The course will attempt to connect architectural design, as a deep, creative procedure with broad fields of innovation, study of structures (typological, formal, technological, ecological, etc.), documentation, as well as other scientific and creative fields, using advanced methodologies for design, spatial representation and fabrication. The aim of this course is to understand the dynamics of space, place and its qualities, the challenging of established building schemes, the experimental process of complex and sometimes unexpected alternative functional programs. The purpose is the final proposal of innovative spatial situations for the human-made environment and landscape, through coherent, compositional, architectural narratives. Particular emphasis is placed on encouraging the development of personal design vocabularies, portraying flexibility and resourcefulness in responding to complex spatial requirements. Students will be challenged to a continuous processing of their design proposal through the use of advanced spatial documentation and representational tools, digital and physical models, which may be conceptual, diagrammatic and not necessarily representational. This year’s topic is titled ‘ARCADIA II’ and it connects concepts such as locality, the cultural expression of pastoralism with advanced design and visionary utopias. Thus, it raises architectural design as a prominent bearer of new meanings and encoded cultural load. ‘ARCADIA II’ is considered regional and yet highly universal, trivial and yet experimental. The design course will be adjusting its activities in the implementation of the european research program within the Horizon2020 frame titled ‘V4Design’, which is investigating the potential repurpose of visual material and its reuse in order to create an advanced design platform and design proposals for architecture and landscape. During the course, we will test operating modules provided by the V4Design research project and short seminars and workshops will be organized on experimental architectural design, advanced documentation and modelling and spatial organization. Design research findings of the course will be used to design and fabricate collective, three-dimensional models. Course projects will be incorporated in the development of the ‘V4Design’ research project. Selected student projects are usually presented in international scientific conferences and proposed to participate in exhibitions in Greece and internationally. The course’s external contributors are Giota Koulali (Dip. Arch. AUTH, MSc Landscape Architecture AUTH, Phd Cand. AUTH), Fotis Vasilakis (Dip.Arch. AUTH, MArch IAAC, UPC Barcelona), Eftihis Efthimiou (Dip. Biology & Technology UoI, M.Arch UTH, Decode Fab Lab) and Despoina Zavraka (Dip. Arch. Mackintosh GSA, MLA AUTH, PhD AUTH)

architectural design, research by design, advanced design technologies

15-07-2019