Studio 06

Studio brief

Collaborations

This year Studio 06 will focus on the theme of ‘Collaborations’. We will continue to investigate the ideas established by the studio in recent years and will again work with good examples of historic and contemporary architecture.

Architecture, more than any other art, is a product of collaboration. A conventional understanding of collaboration in architecture is that which occurs between the different actors that give life to a new building: clients, engineers and city authorities all contribute to the task of design, with the architect supplying a unique artistic vision to shape and co-ordinate these disparate voices.

Our interest expands upon this rather prosaic understanding of collaboration. We will explore collaborations which occur across time. To imagine a new piece of architecture is always about adjusting and appropriating an existing situation and about putting one thing next to another. Cities and buildings evolve through iteration: through construction, demolition and re-construction. They become multi-layered and complex. Authorship becomes ambiguous. Is St Peter’s Basilica in Rome the work of Bramante, who conceived of the initial proposals, or Michelangelo or Maderno, who completed the project 100 years later? Collaboration can give rise to strange and exciting juxtapositions, to mistakes, to ambiguity, to discordant clashes of style and ego.

This year students will again have the chance to propose projects to extend seminal existing pieces of architecture. These buildings will themselves be the products of the work of important architects separated by time and circumstance. As we develop our proposals we will untangle how the vision of the contemporary architect has been informed by that of their predecessor. Design projects will create a new whole in which the relationships between the works, between old and new, is more important than the individual parts.

Projects will be linked programmatically, with the hotel-type used to develop buildings with a significant presence, a civic demeanour and a convivial atmosphere.

In November we will travel to Switzerland to visit seminal works of contemporary architecture by Zumthor, Miller and Maranta, Olgiati and their peers. We will also visit the sites for final design projects.