Researching Realities

The second semester is the continuation and extension of the process, research and skills developed during the first semester through the interpretation and construction of diagrammes and paradigms, a systematic study of architectural references and their consequent transformation into ideas, mechanisms and strategies. The initial framework for this is a nine square grid problem [9SG]: starting from an inscribed yet intuitive sketch, students systematically develop and then transform a scheme into a series of, scaled, eventually habitable, constructions. The parallel study of works by Andrea Palladio and a series of contemporary responses to them leads to their on-site analysis and recording in Italy’s Veneto region, and then to an intervention proposal on the grounds of the Greek pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This intervention restructures the reality of the original sketch as an experience of exhibition, stasis, motion, wandering and a response to a landscape: a brand new place no longer across a city, but the entire Adriatic sea. Through the unfolding of the second semester's work, students internalize, learn to discern and seek for the esoteric logic or laws of the architecture oeuvre, and learn to interpret the latter's diverse manifested instantiations (type and paradigm).