architecture - Sam Fox School - Washington University in St. Louis

Fall 2010
58
ARCH 500/600 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN V-VI
Robert McCarter, Ruth & Norman Moore Professor
A PUBLIC ARCHIVES FOR VENICE:
AN ADDITION TO LE CORBUSIER’S (UNBUILT) VENICE
HOSPITAL
(Comprehensive Studio)
“That which is not built is not really lost. Once its value is
established, its demand for presence is undeniable. It is
merely waiting for the right circumstances.”
-Louis I. Kahn
Pedagogical Objectives
This design studio will engage five fundamental conceptions:
• The unbuilt works of the best architects are most often of
equal or greater quality than those works which were realized,
and they often first present major advances in the work of the
architect; that architectural historians have generally ignored
unbuilt projects; and that unbuilt works of quality should be
studied by students and architects, along with the built works,
as part of their architectural education.
• As we begin the 21st century, every architectural project
should be understood and conceived not as an isolated, selfreferential
object of aesthetic speculation, but as an addition to
a pre-existing inhabited context, whether urban, suburban, or
rural.
• Today’s “globalized” and universally-available civilization,
while offering ever-increasing quantities of information and
opportunities for interchange, cannot produce or sustain
culture, which is always local, and which is essential for the
making of architecture.
• What matters in architecture is not what a building looks like,
but how its spaces are ordered, how it is built, and how these
affect what the building is like to be in, to live in—how it is
experienced in inhabitation by many people over many years.
• A graduate studio project should offer the individual
student the opportunity to begin again, to re-establish their
philosophical, technical, and formal grounds for architectural
design, as well as to rediscover the fundamental principles of
their discipline of architecture.