Related Staff : Beisi Jia
Supervisor: Jia Beisi
Architecture is always public and, unlike art, cannot simply be eliminated. A building has to be socially accepted and culturally appreciated first and foremost on the level of perception. Correspondingly, architecture is subject to all the demands of pleasing. This pleasing never takes place on the level of individual taste, however, but in coming to terms with collective acceptance. The challenge lies in responding to this collective perception, which is essentially based on conventions anchored locally or, in other words, in positioning oneself in accordance with public awareness
If we assume a useful life of more than a hundred years for a building, then it makes sense to divide its individual architectural elements into five levels by the various useful lives of these subsystems:
A building with an ambition to become a hundred years old or more will not be achieved if the relatively short life of its intended use service as the point of departure for the architectural approach.
The consequences of such a perspective are:
The architect’s true core competence lies in the ability to design, that is, in the coordination and integrating of various subfields. This includes the ability to think simultaneously on different levels and scales and to structure process accordingly. The question of the core competence of the discipline of architecture thus clearly lies in the ability to design and relates to physical reality, which trusts in the beauty of the three-dimensional in its urban, immobile dimension.
For architects this means working on the development of new types demonstrating a longer life-span, lower energy-use, high social and cultural acceptance, and neutrality in terms of the building’ use.
The studio is built on 5 exercises in which the themes place, structure, shell, programme and materiality are examined individually and together. The final exercise unites all the thematic areas into a genuine project design.