RESEARCH
PRIMARY STRUCTURES
The pragmatic architect is the one who above all makes conventions speak, he who salvages a poetic dimension from the here and now, who is capable of decontextualizing the already-known and of giving it the luster of poetry.
Ábalos, Iñaki. The Good Life: A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity. Zürich: Park Books, 2017.
In reality, architectural practice often consists of uniting the most diverse loose fragments.
The choice of building system for example appears to be a matter of economics, a choice of the developer or simply a consequence of the profession of the builder or dependent on the dexterity of the self-builder. The organizational scheme should be based on a loose thumb sketch or on a detailed set of instructions from a social housing company. Laminated beams taken from a recently demolished shed may be the occasion to rethink a project….
As an architect, there is often nothing to do but deal with this pragmatically. To bend the limitations. However, this need not be a disadvantage. On the contrary, it is the heterogeneity of fragments and the stories they carry with them that is the inspiring material for the imagination of the pragmatist.
The fragments that will be built with come from the archive of drawings accumulated in the last 7 years of the primary structure master studio. Hundreds of fragments of analyzed buildings come together in an online atlas from which a random selection of building blocks can be generated for you to work with.
It will be an exercise in typological thinking. To make the fragments your own, learn their rules and see what they are capable of. All manipulations are allowed as long as the different parts together form a meaningful sustainable whole.
We make several studies in which together we change and adapt the rules of the game to explore the different design possibilities at a site of our own choosing.
In groups of two, we choose a project that will eventually be enlarged in maquette, plan, detail and a single image. The end result is a primary structure that emerges from an interplay between the various fragments. The program can but need not be a house. The program is merely an alibi to arrive at a design, a framework of experience
You get a crash course in pragmatic thinking, typological design and we organize three lectures in collaboration with Kunsthal.
Welcome to The House of Pragmatism.
RESEARCH
PRIMARY STRUCTURES
