ODESSA
Landings and Crossings

‘Landings at any scale -territory, town or building- are the means by which ‘the open’ is allowed to stand ‘opener’, unveiling what was previously unseen, allowing potentialities to actualize themselves. […..] Serving as instruments of spatial continuity, they are at the same time structural facts and social emblems that have achieved and express stability. [….] unmoving, they allow movement, the sort of movement that is both integrative and exploratory. Their stability is not only tectonic but temporal; like habits and institutions, it is lasting.’[1]

The Unit is increasingly interested in a search for a deeper relationship between architecture, city-building and topography, as eloquently articulated by David Leatherbarrow in many of his books. Using a series of texts as tools, we will continue our investigations on cities undergoing rapid change, where conventional thinking struggles to respond to the uncertainty and where there is a necessity for imaginative thinking brought about by this condition.

What we can learn from an [for us] uncommon urbanity and a city that has undergone systemic change can be invaluable in setting out an approach to our own economic, material, social  and environmental uncertain conditions.

Projects

We will start the year with a series of exercises and workshops, drawing from the personal and the common, in order to develop precision, play, sensibilities and intuition, before embarking on out visit to Odessa and the main project of the year.

Working titles for exercises and workshops are:

Spatial Atmospheres

Walking as an Urban Practice –Landings and Crossings

Material Matters – Odessa Still Lives

Topographically contingent Architecture and Urbanism

Alongside the projects of the year we will also be documenting

Atlas 1– material collection of castings and other experiments

Atlas 2 –places, spatial and topographical conditions

Odessa

‘it was an unattractive rocky district, abruptly breaking off to the sea, without the slightest vegetation, surrounded by a sandy desert from the side of Peresyp and by a wild steppe from the side of Dalnik. And here Odessa was under construction of savage and clay’[2]

Odessa, Ukraine, on the shore of the Black Sea. was founded in 1794 by Catharine the Great near the site of an ancient Greek settlement. It was also the location of a trading post of the Crimean Tatars in the 14th Century. Odessa quickly developed into a centre of international trade, industry and science and was by 1894 the 4th biggest City of the Russian Empire.

‘In the first stage (1794-1820) - the stage of birth of Odessa - a genetic code of destiny of the city was put, as well as the basis of its economic and cultural prosperity. One of the essential tasks becomes creation of an artificial landscape. The creation of private gardens, wine-yards is characteristic for this period.’[3]

Odessa today has about 1.1million inhabitants and is growing. Its development as a therapeutic seaside resort community during the Soviet period has contributed to a population that has almost tripled in the last 100 years.

With the disintegration of the Soviet infrastructure and market Odessa is navigating its way in a complex social and political landscape. Issues of land ownership, land erosion, pollution, clean water and poverty on the one hand and the rise of local and foreign entrepreneurs interests in privatising prime public space on the other. Investment much needed to tackle the former and the destruction of Odessa’s urban  and sea side qualities  a possible fallout of the latter.

‘There is a necessity of integration of the reconstruction tasks, preservation of composite – structural qualities of a historical area – interrelations of ensembles and dominants, visual directions, panoramas and prospects, parities of architectural constructions, spaces and elements of a landscape. The retrospective review of stages of formation of an anthropogenic landscape of Odessa has allowed to reveal historical landscape skeleton, which should remain a basis of creation of ecologically healthy environment of historical city.’[4]

Odessa has always been a city with multicultural inhabitants and multiple and ambiguous identities, seen as exotic across the Russian speaking world giving rise to the notion ‘Odessa’s Kolorit ‘

“They walk along the street, enter the courtyards, the entrances to the buildings, cross from one side of the street to the other, the person leading them in front all the while speaking continuously in a booming voice so that everyone can hear. They stop, people ask questions and they go further, this lasting more than two hours.

Like the stalker in Tarkovsky’s film, the storyteller leads those who have gathered into the ‘room of happiness’ where he is forbidden to go alone. A spell of beauty is attendant throughout the walk, yes a walk, and not excursion…’[5]

The Unit

Starting from a concrete situation of urbanity the unit stresses the use of a combination of research, thinking methodologies, and creative practice to propose strategic interventions that span extremes of scale, from the immediate and personal, to the collective and geographical. A common attitude and investigation into the material manifestation of the environment underpins a continuity from the detailed to the large scale. Architecture and Urbanism themselves are not seen as a shift in scalar thinking, but as overlapping and inseparable fields occupying the same territory.

‘An architecture that strives to be local, but arises out of diverse intelligences, demonstrate both tolerance of diverse contributions and the mutuality if interest with the urban constituency it accommodates. An architecture that is not styled in the manner of traditional motifs is also the one that may be reanimated by contemporary possibilities’ [……] An architecture that result from the work of unnamed builders may challenge the authority of the profession, but it can also invite recognition of the many agents that conspire together in the construction of a cultural project, This expanded field of contributions parallels the range of engagements established by an architecture without clear definitions as an object, the lateral liaisons of buildings with compromised formal qualities and improvised or hybrid structural solutions. Such an architecture may not be famous or frequently pictured as exemplary of ‘native genius’ but may, nevertheless, be indicative of a fabric of affairs that gives to a neighbourhood, town or city durable substance and the promise of value. If such prosaic architecture is laconic or remote, it is also capable of standing as a witness – albeit a silent witness- to the patterns of life manifest in its performance, as if stories of life are inscribed in the spaces of life’[6]

The programme is informed by current local and international urban practice, but also emphasizes the development of intuition and processes to test and develop new forms of architecture and urbanisms in practice as well as questioning the current state of play. It welcomes students as fellow innovators in a programme that is both visionary and hands on in seeking to develop architectural and urban futures that are both socially, economically and environmentally sustainable, distinctive and enjoyable.

We believe in an approach to teaching based on a critique through optimism rather than complaint.

The two week field-trip to Odessa is planned for week 5-6, where we will carry out intensive site investigations, and expand our contacts and collaborations established with our colleagues at the Odessa State Academy for Construction & Architecture.

Student who wish to return to Diploma 10 will if they wish, have the opportunity to develop themes, approaches and propositions as an extension thesis to last year’s work, and should contact us for individual conversations.

Tools

We interrogate the tools we employ to help us develop our architectural propositions and understand their possible implications and repercussions in the design process. The Unit places particular emphasis on exploring methodologies to develop and instigate alternative methods of architectural thinking, developing students’ abilities of critical thought, and latent architectural talent.

We encourage a hands on approach to all work. Conceptual and critical architectural judgement is made in a direct feedback loop with 1:1 physical exploration, be that direct action and participation, or iterative material testing. Lateral architectural methodologies are used as investigative and provocative tools to uncover underlying architectural and urban potential, to instigate alternative creative paths to effective and surprising end-proposals.

The role of portfolios as environments for generating judgement is emphasised. Drawings and Models are considered to be instruments of speculative, conceptual and design thinking and not mere representation tools.

Notions

Urbanity – We will take as our ground and starting point a condition of urbanity: a matrix of cultural, political, historic, social, economic, physical, environmental, domestic, public etc. layers.

Tectonic – is the understanding of the physical forces and displacements that have given rise to this urbanity, a constructed and material reality.

Displacement – Tectonic parts, which have been cut or ruptured, can lead to large-scale displacements, whose effects are evident locally. The unit assumed that such displacements in an urban context connect a physical environment with the other factors that make up the complexity of the city. Such factors encompass social systems, religious displacement, and political order and bear a relation to form.

Tolerance – To be able to link, connect, and suture the parts together. The unit developed the notion of tolerance as a measure of the articulation of physical details in architecture, as well as programmatically, and in terms of the degree of fit of the architectural proposition into an existing urban context. Tolerance is both a question of material, of technical precision and connected to political and social structures at a wider level.

Signy Svalastoga is the Postgraduate Academic Leader at ASD
Joerg Maier is an Associate at Witherford Watson Mann Architects

Essential Unit Readings

‘Architecture Oriented Otherwise’ and ‘Uncommon Ground’ by David Leatherbarrow, ‘

Thinking Hands’ by Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘

The Craftsman’ by Richard Sennett,

‘Kaleidoscopic Odessa – History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine’ by Tanya Richardson ‘Evolution of the landscape, historical planning and elements of Odessa’ by Nadiya Yeksareva and Vladimir Yeksarev, Odessa State Academy of Construction & Architecture

Further Readings/Inspirations:

Peter Zumthor: Atmospheres

Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki: Praise of Shadows

Hellfrich & Whitaker Editors: Crafting a Modern World The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond

Alan Read, Editor: ‘Architecturally Speaking – Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday

Dziga Vertov: Man with a Movie Camera, Odessa 1929

[1] David Leatherbarrow, ‘Architecture Oriented Otherwise’

[2] Deribas A.M. Staraya Odessa… 1913

[3] Nadya Yeksareva, Vladimir Yeksarev: Evolution of the Landscape, historical planning and elements of Odessa

[4] Nadya Yeksareva, Vladimir Yeksarev: Evolution of the Landscape, historical planning and elements of Odessa

[5] Valery Netrebsky, ‘Walks in Old Odessa’, in Tanya Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa, p.144

[6] David Leatherbarrow: Uncommon Ground