Exhibition: Build Topologies

The Studio AS5 is a collaborative visiting professor master studio in architectural design. During the Spring semester 2009 the guest teachers were Portuguese architects Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus. The architectural assignment was to design the Marine Biology Research Station at the Guincho bay national park near Lisbon. During the semester work the task of interpreting the large and complex architectural program consisting of many different parts was intentionally combined with the intense studies of the relationship between architecture, landscape and natural elements of the site.

The phenomena of geological layering of landscape, the erosion caused by the sea, the concept of cutting the spaces out of a compact mass of granite rock, the intricate articulations of topography, etc. were turned into design models creating the clear individual principles for the architectural structures that the students were investigating in their projects. Each of the works presented in this exhibition catalogue clarifies such an individual case of artificially built topology embedded in the site.

The studio-work was structured in four singular steps: ambition, confrontation, project and construction. Each step was discussed both independently, infiltrated into each other and connected into a whole. Each of the architectural themes used in the design process and their mutual relation left the traces onto the final project. Weaving the investigations on partial themes in and around the main project led the students to tell and to make visible another story – their own story of making the project.

During the work the particular interest was to study the relationship between physical presence, materiality and architectural abstraction starting from an idea of architecture that coherently fuses representation and its internal/ external spatial qualities. Therefore, as we did in a different way in our earlier courses the architectural themes, the design processes and the projects were investigated, developed and finally constructed with the help of 1/50 scale large white architectural models.

Students V09AS5: Kristoffer Knoph Andreassen, Christian-Storm Brenden, Leonora Brekke, Sara Duarte, Charlotte Elstad, Joana Gomes, Lene Marie Grennes, Emma Katarina Helin