Final Review Approaching..

Dear Students,
the end of our course is approaching on high speed and we are very curious about your final results. So here are some guidelines and comments for the end of the Follymorph course.
First of all I would like to congratulate all of you for the great effort you put into this course, and the great results you shared with us on this blog. Keep up the momentum generated so far and we will end with excellent results. For the last couple of days we are planning to proceed as follows: I will post now some guidelines for the material we want to see for the final presentation. As your midterms are over now I hope you will have time to work on the Follymorph Project in the next couple of days. I especially encourage you to grasp the task of designing a stair within the geometry borders of your project with more rigor and focus on the emergent design conditions and possibilities within your project. The Stair is a crucial problem in the design task of the Follymorph project, and we will definetly put a special eye on the solution of this architectonic problem.

A last comment on the designs and renderings showed so far:
to malapropise a former Bauhaus Faculty member: Sometimes less can be really more......

We will start the course on Friday 11am by doing a tablecrit, walking from project to project, discussing the results, and giving last advises before the review. The afternoon is reserved for you working on the presentation: Plans Graphics & More. By the way: Did anyone of you have the chance to print a 3D Model?
The Saturday is reserved for discussions on the discoursive impact of the work of the course. We would like to discuss with you the ideas you developed within the course in order to achieve rigor within the design and argument of your projects.

Sunday is the day: Presentations...

Some technical things about the presentation format:

Coloration/Chromatics:
We would like all of you to rely on a specific coloration scheme of your projects, concerning the renderings, as we want to see the geometry of your projects clearly. The main color should be white. You can also create differentiation with the surface quality (Glossy, Opaque, metallic surfaces, Brushed metal, Glass etc) Of course you can put your eye on how to work with light and shadow to achieve specific cinematic effects and atmospheres. No bump mappings, as those are not a clear representation of the geometry you created originally. Physical Sky, Mental Ray renderings in Maya would be great, but are not a must. Render with the rendering Engine in Maya you feel comfortable with. Silhouette representations of humans to recognize the scale (and Silhouettes only!)

Plans/Sections
I posted a couple of links in the right column of the blog. This links lead to a variety of graphic representations of curvilinear forms in terms of plans and sections. I would encourage you to pic this up as a source of inspiration for the graphical appearance of your plans and sections. All of you are skilled, educated architects, so I guess you know how plans and sections should look, but it would be a great achievement to understand how a graphical 2D representation of complex curved geometries in architecture could be represented with the traditional tools of architecture.

Presentation
We will rely on the concept of presenting the work over the blog. No printing required. Let´s call this our contribution to sustainable teaching, and we have all the projects documented together on the net. My advise to you: make a copy of the entire blog on a CD or Harddrive, who knows how long this will stay online. By making a copy you can store this course away.

We are really looking forward to see all of you and your projects.

Lets do the last weightlifting together and end this course with excellence, elegance and beauty...

Best

Matias del Campo

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.