ARC3016Y S
Instructor: Petros Babasikas
Meeting Section: L0102
Tuesday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

This Semester’s Thesis Prep course and Research Studio reconsider the Archipelago as a model for making architecture against limit conditions of a contemporary city.

Diffusion/Civitas

An Archipelago is made up of diverse yet collective island identities against expanding totalities. It contains enclaves of civitas vs. urbanization, states of exception against the diffusion and fragmentation of the public sphere, politics vs. economics.¹ An Archipelago emerges from divided cities or politically contested territories, the postindustrial zones and digital networks in the Western city; it resists new feudalisms of Iconic architecture, indefinite growth, and renews the ruins of Modernism in the Global South. The Archipelago is a long-standing projective model for architecture and the city for a line of architects and urbanists including K.F. Schinkel, E. May, O.M. Ungers, R. Koolhaas and P.V. Aureli.

Vital Commons

This course will actively pursue the Archipelago model via the agency of drawing, research, and research through making –not merely accepting it as a given state of things– in order to give architectural identity to objects, aggregations and fields, investigate versions of resilience and reform specific commons..

Seminar/Studio

During the first part of the Winter Semester the course will run as

1. a distinct Thesis Prep seminar, aiming for each student to establish a clear position vis-à-vis the above, through stated inquiries, navigations, types, readings, drawings and site documentations for a future thesis; and
2. a Research Studio testing individual inquiries/positions on two limit conditions of a Mediterranean Metropolis: one an urban sequence of border zones, routes, and de-urbanization (an urban Archipelago), the other across a specific group of islands (a literal Archipelago).

In the second half of the Semester the course will focus on (2) as a design project.

City-Sea

The Research studio will work in two non-continuous territories in Greece, both manifestations of a City-Sea, with deep, polytropic infrastructures, inherent flux, human and animal migrations, hidden topographies, navigation lines and energy exchanges: a route between the Historic Centre of Athens and the port of Eleusis (crossing a series of urban limits) and a group of islands in the south Icarian Sea (secluded among hyper-urbanized waters). Selecting either of these sites, students will connect to two organizations working on ‘the ground’ against the shrinking of the commons and climate crisis: a young Public Cultural Organization and an Institute for Marine Conservation. Their design projects will include hosting facilities, community gardens and water infrastructures; marine wildlife sanctuaries, research and education spaces. These buildings, distributed programs and collective identities will establish architectural networks on geopolitical territories.

Students will revisit their individual inquiries and restate their positions after final Studio Presentations, with the option of shifting their work to other sites already documented. They will work on their Thesis projects in response to the model and problem of the Archipelago.

¹See Pier Vittorio Aureli,”Toward the Archipelago.” Log No. 11 (Winter 2008), 91-120.