Follymorph - a course at the DIA Bauhaus Dessau

The main task of this course is the design of a Folly, implying design methods and analysis in a rigorous fashion.


The typology of the Folly, which surfaced in European architecture history within the 16th century, is described by qualities such as extravagant, frivolous or fanciful, designed more for artistic expression than for practicality.
The approach of this course is looking for specific design solutions within the contemporary field of architecture. The folly, and its inherent qualities of beauty will simultaneously help to understand the qualities of performative surfaces as well as the underlying program of the economy of form. These phenomena, which have been explored in the sciences, starting from the explorations of Leonardo da Vinci, to Ernst Haeckel and up to the genetic engineering under research in the Laboratories of Craig Venter can result in novel insights within the field of architecture. Taking this as a preposition we will approach a series of terms, connected to the mentioned explorations, and scrutinize them for their potentials in architecture design. The students will be supplied with a specific site for their Folly, in order to create comparable results, they will be provided with a set of terms for exploration, and they will be given specific design tools. Despite the fact that the tools of design are the same, the resulting entities can find a manifold of expressions and results, as can natural phenomena relying on the same principals like self-organization, emergence and rule based systems. The goal of the course is the application of rigor within the design process, as well as in the application of discoursive issues, in order to find and define the students approach within the discipline of contemporary architecture, focusing on the individual approach.