ARC3020Y F
Instructor(s): Petros Babasikas
Meeting Section: L0104
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

The Archipelago Studio is an ongoing design research project at the Daniels Faculty.  It contains a body of MArch Thesis projects, essays and visual essays, drawings and models.  Each iteration of the studio is experimental and developed from the previous one.  All explore a method for producing Architecture against Crisis.

Here is the Archipelago Studio’s latest version.

Crisis: NASA, Siberian Forest Fires, Summer 2021

The Archipelago Studio is based on the following assumptions:

1. We redefine the notion of Site, not as a plot but as a network – a mesh of actors, vectors, fields and objects. Not control, masterplan, tabula rasa, but allyship, relationality, working with what we have. The Crises of our time, previously slow and invisible, are now globally present, in catastrophic bursts. The Archipelago method is an entry to this. It allows us to work and think in decentralized, resilient ways.

2. Describing a Crisis is not enough. We need to act against it. To do this we can find an Agent: an organization, or synergy of institutions driving social, urban, environmental change. The Agent is a close friend to our project, helping us reinvent its architecture. We thus redefine our notion of Program, not as function, service, optimization, but as architectural footprint, motivation, impact. We mediate between infrastructures, resources, and local groups.

3. An architecture against, or despite, different Crises cannot save the world, but it can drive change: social justice, integration, conservation, renewal, shelter, sanctuary, public space. These goals define a thesis (a position). Research-through-making – documenting, drawing, agent- and re-building, turns it into a project.

Sanctuary: Jun’ya Ishigami’s Water Garden, 2018

4. Our architecture may engender spaces of freedom and joy. Those spaces will be iconic, sanctuaries or pilot projects against the Crisis.

Based on these assumptions, the Archipelago studio provides an open template for students to do their own thing. Students will consider different Crises, getting to know global sites intimately, producing visual essays, finding agents and partnerships, re-building composite models or drawings, as follows:

PART 1: Docu-drawing

September – November 2023

Storytelling: Irina Rouby-Apelbaum, Jia Jia Shi, Ivy Chan, Stephanie Tung, Atieh Daneshian, Athens Model/Map, Archipelago Studio 2020.

Students build their thesis topic using narrative and drawing methods. They explore a site as a story and conduct field or archival research. They use found footage, testimonies, geographic data; they make maps, build models, film them, take them out into the rain. They produce a time-based narrative – a visual essay, or docu-drawing – organizing their findings, distilling their positions into a thesis. Montage helps them structure their thesis with a strong architectural language. How can architecture and its media respond to a crisis?

PART 2: Activism (agent-building)

November – December 2023

Students invent or contact an organization driving social, urban, or environmental change: an NGO, a cooperative, an independent group, or an institution active, invested, intensely working in their site. By its mandate, they define their partnership, focusing their thesis. They ‘get dirty’ with their site, adding chapters, interviews, maps or speculations to their visual essay. This is the first sketch of their thesis project. Is architectural activism an architecture without architects?

PART 3: Re-Building

January – February 2024

Re-Building: Ljubomir Denković, Monument to the Revolution, Grmeč, Bosnia & Herzegovina, 1979, and Steven Messing, Alien Covenant Concept Art, 2017

Students design or re-adapt a building for their agent. They may also design a network of interventions, an Archipelago of spaces, machines or modules across multiple locations, a system of routes, etc. They produce models and drawings, battered by a current crisis, so they un-build and re-build their project. The work now includes unexpected pieces. What does it mean to build and un-build a project?

PART 4: Exhibition

February – April 2024

Students re-make their visual essays, drawings, models, agents, buildings and networks, against their thesis, saying less rather than more. This final stage reframes their early docu-drawing as architecture, via an exhibition design for their final review.

The Archipelago Studio is not about growth, but about conservation, rebuilding, mediation, working with what we have.

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An optional Studio Trip to Greece will be scheduled as part of the course after the final review. It will include one or two field courses in Conservation, Activism, or Re-Building vs. different Crises, in collaboration with cultural/activist-run spaces in Athens, and the Archipelago Institute of Marine Conservation in the East Aegean.

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Click here for the Archipelago Studio Assignments and Key Readings per the above Schedule.