The circus (An experiment). International architectural Studio. AeA.
Despite the proliferation of Institutions such as Universities, architectural Associations and large scale exhibitions can´t on their own define the legitimacy of contemporary architecture today. Architecture in Alicante is a constellation of public spheres as narratives of autonomous subjectivity. AeA seek to enact the multidisciplinary direction through which architectonical practices and processes come most alive. In the studios, a constitutive map of contemporary knowledge circuits: art, theory, science, culture, ecology, and politics collides. Urban systems and meta-territory experience open to freedom openness and changes.
Alicante´s School is an area of uncertainty and reflection. This space has been built among everyone students, teachers, institutions, guests and citizens, hundreds of voices within a discursive dynamic system… It is a democratic space for discussion.
The construction of this experimental space need:
- Openness. To incorporate open formats and new work contexts. Experimental practices and learning systems.
- To incorporate student´s upcoming and active vision. The student is part of our teaching, our goal the autonomy based on their own maps of projective action.
- To embrace diversity. Working on broad contexts. Students and teachers experience on their capabilities, knowledge and limits as an essential part for the teaching portfolio.
4 Proposal for the future. The space is for managing the future reality.
- Uncertainty. Emotion to work on the unknown to find the structure for the fiction. To accept complexity of knowledge in contemporary teaching.
- Research as autonomy of thought. It is committed to scientific knowledge to expand research and knowledge.
- Imagination. Imaginative space as a process of relationship.
- To build an exhibition space, a document. The school is a document, a portfolio itself.
- Discussion as a search for knowledge. To accept the multidisciplinary approach of a changing profession.
- Risk. The University of Alicante was born in an unreferenced context, on a bizarre periphery.
- – Dynamicity. Travel for deferred knowledge.
The Circus is a collective, dynamic, experiential and future process. It is a living and to live in. It is productive and exciting. It is an adventure, a risk.
Objectives
“Architecture is a fuzzy amalgamation of ancient knowledge and contemporary practice, an awkward way to look at the world and an inadequate medium to operate on it… Architecture is too slow. Yet, the word “architecture” is still pronounced with certain reverence (outside of the profession). It embodies the lingering hope –or the vague memory of hope- that shape, form, coherence could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily. Maybe, architecture doesn´t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything –a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, and the diagram of everything.”
Rem Koolhass. “Content”
This year we will build a space for learning architecture, an experimental architectonical room to discuss about architecture, a “Circus Room”. No disciplines and no hierarchies. The space as a zone of activity a communicative and practical intersection.
The Circus Room serves as an arrangement that provide room for experiments in thinking, in methodological approaches, in all forms of translation and in other forms of the production of knowledge.
To understand the situation we will travel to the Bianale of Venize 2016 in September (29, 30 Sep., 1 Oct.)
In the first semester we will design and construct three kind of spaces to understand the function of an interactive atmosphere: a conflictive space (Ring), a soft space (Love Room) and a leisure space (Karaoke)
The ring
The last two decades have witnessed a series of conflicts. To understand the contemporary architectural space, we need to manage the emergent habitational problems to offer a singular perspective on the limits.
We will design a conflictive space, a space to fight, to discuss and to win. We´ll focus in conflictive contemporary situations. Refugees and walls. We will design a wall. Timing four weeks.
The Love Room
The pop up spaces appear everywhere. The ordinary and the emergence and maintenance of manners, customs, and responsibilities are part of the everyday architecture and live. Soft spaces signals an attempt to understand the implications of relational approaches for spatial planning and interpersonal programs.
We will design a soft space, a space to love, to fraternize, to become close friends. We´ll focus in Love Hotels in Tokyo with creative names and kitschy façades, often adorned with neon colors, and gaudy decor.
We will design a room. Timing four weeks.
The Karaoke
“Space has no room, time not a moment for us. We are excluded. In order to be included – to help our homecoming- we must gathered into thir meaning (we are the subject as well as the object of architecture). Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in our image is place, and time in our image is occasion”. Aldo van Eyck. Smithson, Alison, ed., Team 10 primer, MIT Press, Boston, 1968.
We will design a leisure space, a space for fun, to enjoy and to spend a good time a space for happiness. We´ll focus in the Karaoke spaces with color and music, stage and multiscreen television. We will design a classroom. Timing four weeks.