syllabus gibraltar 2012 taubman college architectural ... · this page: granada and fez - two...

Syllabus Gibraltar 2012Taubman College

In its purest form, arbitrage is risk free. This studio will explore the architectural potentionals of arbitrage.

Architectural Arbitrage 2012Architectural Arbitrage will inspect the spatial implications of non-architectural factors in the past and future shapings of the built environ-ment. This investigative studio will work through analytic research and generative exercises that cultivate a mastery of translation between the abstract and the material.

The objective of the studio is to demonstrate: 1) That space and material are mediums with enormous agency; 2) How architects can act as representatives of these mediums in order to ef-fect change, rather than only as respondents to a set of predetermined demands. Thus, concepts such as “fairness”, when considered through an architectural lens, can begin to redefine the de-cision making of society at large.

-syllabus

-Satellite Image of Gibraltar


1. Location:

The site of the studio is located and structured along the two coasts that flank the Strait of Gibraltar. For millennia, this region has been the locus of shifting (swapping) religious, political, cultural, linguis-tic, climactic, and economic regimes. Yet, unlike other regions of such contrasts, such incongruencies have managed to strike a pro-vocative balance that is imbedded in the physical and non-physical space of the area. Moreover, given the region’s long and ongoing het-erogeneous character, it contains abundant and irrefutable evidence of the mutual influence of the built environment with religious, political, legal, and financial processes. North of the Strait, we find Gibraltar, a territory that is both British and Spanish, and neither. Its location has made it a crucial military asset; yet, its continued survival rests on its ability to be open and non-strategic, a destination for tourism and banking. Immediately to the South of the Strait, in an act of a geographic mirroring, we find Ceuta, a Spanish city that is not in Spain at all, but in the unusual place between two nations (Spain and Morocco) and two continents (Africa and Europe). The actual geographic and political situation of these places is far from straightforward: the accumulation of millennia of social, cul-tural, and religious dysplasia provides the studio with an incredible territory for conducting an investigation into architectural arbitrage. In its purest form, arbitrage is risk free: it produces profit through the exploitation of differences in the price of a particular asset. It is the objective of the studio to identify and record the spatial and material outcomes of this dysplasia and to grasp the opportunity to occupy this arbitrage space as a means to not only expand the potential products of architectural activity, but also to expand the agency of the discipline in contemporary society. By understanding first-hand, the spatial and material consequences of the various social, cultural, or economic factors that have shaped the built environment of and around Gibraltar’s extremely layered contexts, students will work to translate between the traditional artifacts of architectural agency and the contexts within which they operate.

2. Pedagogic Intent:

The studio is primarily concerned with the act of translation—as a means and an end: students will learn how to operate in both the ab-stract and the concrete, moving back and forth, from one to another. Students will reinforce their ability develop a self-critical, intellectual project of architecture through the shaping of space and material. Through a series of action driven, spatial exercises, students will acquire a series of conceptual skills that deal directly with space mak-ing through a consideration of shifting and competing contexts.

3. Outcomes and Deliverables:

For the duration of the course, students will speculate and develop abstract concepts through spatial and material definition. At various sites along the Strait, students will be asked to examine their physical surroundings through an initial documentation of the site’s non-material and physical characteristics. This documentation will take on the form of two glossaries: one verbal and one visual. Next, stu-dents will execute a series of spatially driven, design projects to pro-duce multiple, but specific outcomes. Students will pair an abstract concept (i.e. closeness, comfort, public, private) to a specific design project (i.e. plaza, entryway, passageway, courtyard, kiosk, boundary, threshold). What are the formal characteristics of “comfort” defined in house located in the desert versus a temperate climate? How is “sacred” understood when a mosque is re-appropriated as a church? How is “community” interpreted in a Christian, versus Muslim residential neighborhood? What does a study of “closeness” yield in terms of medina architecture (old city), vernacular residences, and cultural practices? How private is a riad (traditional house) under a restrictive political regime versus a tourist governance?

4. Long-term Objectives:

As professionals, architects are held accountable for affecting/im-pacting the wellbeing of society, historically exercising their agency through the making of buildings. Yet, space and material, mediums of tremendous agency, still remain extremely underrepresented in society’s decision-making. “Architectural Arbitrage” hopes to in-crease the discipline’s agency not through an understanding of how to make a better building, but rather though a development of skills that refine the architect’s ability to communicate the agency of space and material itself. Whereby architects and architecture are involved in decision making at the level of policy: imagine a welfare state that no longer distributes wealth under an accounting-based formula of “fairness” that dictates that each citizen receives the same dollar amount; a type of accounting that would drastically change if it were to consider the cost differentials of a person living in a city versus one in the countryside.

By understanding the multiple spatial/material outcomes for a common abstract concept, students will lay the groundwork for dem-onstrating how spatial thinking, or the particulars of an architectural mindset, can exert influence beyond the immediate and traditional domain of the discipline.

-A: Irene Hwang 2010-11 Oberdick Fellow A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 USA

-E: [email protected]: www.constructing-communication.com

- COURSE DESCRIPTION: (Outlined in Four Parts)-


The area occupied around and along the Strait of Gibraltar is a highly contested territory that is unexpectedly balanced.

Centuries of political, religious, and economic shifts have resulted in an incredibly rich and layered built environment that is unreplicated anywhere else in the world. These shears and shifts are the subject of our inquiry.

There is a surprising dearth of recent inqui-ry into the spatial and material consequences of the territories along the Strait. Elsewhere these conflicts have created tears (both liquid and rips) in the social and physical fabric of the communities that endure such radical chang-es. Yet in this area, there is a certain spa-tial co-existence that begs to be documented and unpacked.

In the tradition of anthropological fieldwork, we will be acting as observers and our task is to act as ghostwriters of the spatial narratives of the region.

Take for example the paired photos featured on this page: Granada and Fez - two cities that bridge two continents and two religions are equilateral in terms of their architectural DNA, but how the two cites operate at a finer grain of communal space and building, lies at the heart of our intellectual inquiry.

-Africa and Europe -- They don’t look so different.

- RE-ESTABLISHING INQUIRY -


The Strait is not so straight.

Even as young architects, we know that a build-ing design is the cummulative result of thousands and thousands of design decisions. Contrary to what non-architects think, space is not empty.

The ojective of Studio Arbitrage, is to under-stand the complicated processes of translation that lies at the core of our discipline and pro-fession. Simply: how does architecture transform the abstract into concrete material and space? How do we know when what we’ve done is correct? How do we know when what we’ve built is comfort-able? What makes the same space private for one community and public for another?

Nowhere is this condition of shifting abstrac-tions as present as in the area along the Strait of Gibraltar. Millenia of shifts in governments, relgions, and markets have specific architectural consequences that we will be examining at great detail.

Both historical and contemporary examples (at all scales) will form the focus of our work: church-mosques, palace-museums, house-hotels, countries-within-other-countries, to name a few.

-Domus Magazine -- Project Herecles

- ALONG AND INBETWEEN THE STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR -


- THE POWER OF THE ARCHITECTURAL MINDSET -

What is a dollar worth?

As professionals, architects are held account-able for affecting the wellbeing of society, historically exercising their agency through the making of buildings. Yet, space and material—mediums of tremendous agency—remain extremely underrepresented in society’s decision-making. Architectural Arbitrage frames the discipline’s agency not through an understanding of how to make a better building, but rather though the architect’s capacity to communicate the instru-mentality of space and material to a much larger constituency.

Imagine a welfare state that distributes re-sources under a predictable formula of “fair-ness” where each citizen receives the same dollar amount: such fairness accounting would drastical-ly change if considerations of urban/rural cost differentials were introduced. Only architecture can provide a completely considered, material response to the complex set of criteria and con-sequences that determine the cumulative material and non-material cost differentials of a person living in a city versus one in the countryside.

-Revised accounting -- Redefinition of “Fairness”


The foundation for the pedagogical intent of the Taubman 2012 Gibralater studio is grounded in my own background in architectural publishing and as an architect and editor.

Architects are increasingly generating their own areas of agency. Instead of relying on the dic-tates of the spatial-functional requirements of a building, our discipline is increasingly moving forward into other realms of archiectural action that are not immediately recognized within the traditional spheres of our practice.

In order to prepare for a long and prosperous career within the field, this studio will help to prepare students to explore a variety of differ-ent techniques, and then be asked to focus on those methods which offer the most promise for long-term development.

The studio is designed so that students will develop skills that serve them far beyond the academic environment.

Thus, in addition to the more traditional meth-ods of drawing, photography, and video, students will also be asked to participate directly in the office visits through student-lead conver-sations. Moreover, students will focus on de-veloping their own architectural topics and to position themselves within not only the Taubman architectural community, but also the discipline at large.

-* Please refer to original Gibraltar presenta-tion that discusses architectural activity at different scales and formats

- STUDIO FOUNDATIONS -


PRE-COURSE

Apply :: 02/03

F :: Initial Registration

Confirm :: 02/17

W :: Final Decisions

Funding :: 02/21

W :: ELF Grant Due

Deposit :: 03/05

W :: Deposit Due

Prep :: March

:: Accomodation

:: Travel

:: Visits

:: Visas (paperwork)

SPRING 2012 - TAUBMAN

USA

Week 1 :: 05/04

AA :: Review Itinerary

:: Finalize Visas

:: Vaccines (if required)

Week 2 :: 05/07

AA :: Introduction to Arbitrage

:: Prepare Documentation

Materials

SPAIN

Week 3 :: 05/14

Capital :: Madrid

:: Toledo

:: Escorial

:: Segovia

Week 4 :: 05/21

South :: Cordoba

:: Seville

:: Cadiz

SPAIN + UK

Week 5 :: 05/28

Strait :: Tarifa

:: Algeciras

:: Ceuta

:: Gibraltar

MOROCCO

Week 6 :: 06/04

Africa :: Tangier

:: Rabat

:: Fez

:: Marrakech

Week 7 :: 06/11

Layers :: Malaga

:: Granada

:: Almeria

- BUDGET OVERVIEW (WORKING) -

Flight = 1000-1500 USD (DTW - MAD)

Housing = 40-45 USD/night (Spain)

= 35-40 USD/night (Africa)

Eurail** = 301 USD (5 days)

= 405 USD (8 days)

Food + = 30 USD / day

Admission

________________________________________

TOTAL = +/- 4150 USD = +/- 3150 USD (with Dept. stipend)

-

** Train costs can be combined with Eurail for

longer more expensive legs, and local RENFE

(Spain) and ONCF (Morocco) shorter train legs.

- STUDIO CALENDAR AND BUDGET (WORKING) -


- Working Bibliography:Jan. 22, 2012 Contreras, Rafael. Estudio Descriptivo De Los Monumentos árabes De Granada: Sevilla Y Córdoba ó Sea La Alhambra, El Alcázar Y La Gran Mezquita De Occidente. 2a ed. Madrid: A. Rodero, 1878.

Abrams, Janet. Else/where: Mapping New Cartogra-phies of Networks And Territories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006.

Alomar, Mohammed Abdulrahman. History, Theory And Belief: A Conceptual Study of the Tradition-al Mosque In Islamic Architecture. , 2000.

Anderson, Glaire D. Revisiting Al-Andalus: Per-spectives On the Material Culture of Islamic Iberia And Beyond. Boston: Brill, 2007.

Aranda, Benjamin, and Chris Lasch. Tooling. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Ascher, Kate, and Wendy Marech. The Works: Anat-omy of a City. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Atelier Bow-Wow, Kaijima, Momoyo, Junzŏ̄ Kuroda, and Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu. Made In Tokyo. Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing Co., 2006.

Atelier Bow-Wow. Pet Architecture. Tokyo: World Photo Press, 2002.

Atelier Bow-Wow. Graphic Anatomy / Atelier Bow-wow. Tokyo: Toto Shuppan, 2007.

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 2000.

Barrucand, Marianne, and Achim Bednorz. Moor-ish Architecture In Andalusia. Cologne: Taschen, 1992.

Blaser, W. Innen-Hof in Marrakesch: islamische Geschichte als Gegenwart = Courtyards in Mar-rakech : the living presence of Islamic history. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2004.

Bravo Nieto, Antonio. Modernismo Y Art Decó En La Arquitectura De Melilla. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2008.

Corfis, Ivy A. Al-Andalus, Sepharad And Medieval Iberia: Cultural Contact And Diffusion. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

Syllabus Gibraltar 2012Taubman College- Working Bibliography (cont):Jan. 22, 2012

DeLanda, Manuel, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York, 2000.

Edwards, Brian. Courtyard Housing: Past, Present And Future. Abingdon [England]: Taylor & Fran-cis, 2006.

Frishman, Martin. The Mosque: History, Architec-tural Development & Regional Diversity. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Foreign Office Architects. Phylogenesis: Foa’s Ark. Barcelona: Actar, 2003.

Gold, Peter. Europe Or Africa?: a Contemporary Study of the Spanish North African Enclaves of Ceuta And Melilla. Liverpool: Liverpool Univer-sity Press, 2000.

Gold, Peter. Gibraltar: British Or Spanish? Lon-don: Routledge, 2005.

Gold, Peter. A stone in Spain’s shoe: the search for a solution to the problem of Gibraltar: Liv-erpool University Press, 1994.

Goury, Jules, and Owen Jones. Plans, Elevations, Sections, And Details of the Alhambra. London: O. Jones, 1842-45.

Grabar, Oleg. The Alhambra. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Herdeg, Klaus. Formal Structure In Islamic Ar-chitecture of Iran And Turkestan. New York: Riz-zoli International Publications, 1990.

Irwin, Robert. The Alhambra. London: Profile, 2004.

Kadish, Sharman. Jewish Heritage In Gibraltar: an Architectural Guide. Reading: Spire Books in association with Jewish Heritage UK, 2007.

Klanten, Robert. Data Flow 2: Visualizing In-formation In Graphic Design. Berlin: Gestalten, 2010.

Lasansky, D. Medina. Architecture And Tourism: Perception, Performance And Place. English ed. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

Laseau, Paul. Freehand Sketching: an Introduc-tion. New York: Norton, 2004.

Luna, Ian. Behaviorology. New York: Rizzoli, 2010.

Maas, Winy. Costa Iberica: MVRDV. Barcelona, Spain: ACTAR, 1998.

Micara, Ludovico. The Mediterranean Medina. Roma: Gangemi, 2009.

Mikou, Khalid. Riad, Modulor Et Tatami. Casa-blanca: Arch Media Editions, 2003.

Miller, Susan Gilson. The Architecture And Memory of the Minority Quarter In the Muslim Mediterra-nean City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2010.

Nicolai, Carsten, and Dorothea Strauss. Carsten Nicolai: Static Fades. Zürich: JRP/Ringier , 2007.

Nicolai, Carsten. Grid Index. Berlin: Gestalten, 2009.

O’Meara, Simon. Space And Muslim Urban Life: At the Limits of the Labyrinth of Fez. London: Routledge, 2007.

O’Reilly, Gerry. Ceuta And the Spanish Sovereign Territories: Spanish And Moroccan Claims. Durham: International Boundaries Research Unit, 1994.

Petruccioli, Attilio. Beyond the Wall: Notes On Multicultural Mediterranean Landscape. Bari: Un-ione Tipografica Editrice, 2009.

Petruccioli, Attilio. Understanding Islamic Ar-chitecture. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.

Reston, James. Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inqui-sition, And the Defeat of the Moors. New York: Doubleday, 2005.

Slyomovics, Susan. The Walled Arab City In Lit-erature, Architecture And History: the Living Medina In the Maghrib. London: Frank Cass, 2001.

Sordo, Enrique. Moorish Spain Cordoba, Seville, Granada. London: Elek, 1963.

Tadgell, Christopher. Islam: From Medina to the Magreb And From the Indies to Istanbul. Abing-don: Routledge, 2008.

Turan, Neyran. New Geographies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of De-sign, 2009.

Varnelis, Kazys. The Infrastructural City: Net-worked Ecologies In Los Angeles. Barcelona: Ac-tar, 2008.

Weston, Stephen. Remains of Arabic In the Span-ish And Portuguese Languages. With a Sketch by Way of Introduction of the History of Spain,: From the Invasion to the Expulsion of the Moors. London: printed by S. Rousseau, Wood Street, Spa Fields; and sold by Payne, Pall Mall; and Clark, New Bond Street, 1810.

Whishaw, Bernhard, and Ellen M Whishaw. Arabic Spain: Sidelights On Her History And Art. Lon-don: Darf Publishers, 1986.

Wright, Gwendolyn. The Politics of Design In French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.


Working Building Bibliography:Jan 22, 2012

Reina Sofia / Jean Nouvel

Prado Extention / Rafael Moneo

Bankinter / Rafael Moneo

Atocha / Rafael Moneo

La Maternidad / Rafeal Moneo

La Caixa Forum / Herzog and deMeuron

El Mirador / MVRDV

Carabanchel Housing / Dosmasuno

Ecobulevar / Ecosistema Urbano Caranbanchel Housing / FOA

Madrid Public Housing / Thom Mayne

Villaverde Housing / David Chipperfield

Escalator / Torres La Peña Architects Santa Ana Church / Miguel Fisac

Metropol Parasol / Juergen Mayer H Retiro Park / Madrid

Cordoba Mosque-Church / Cordoba

Alhambra / Granada

Bullrings / Seville / Madrid / Cordoba / Granada

Real Alcázar / Seville

Marrakech Airport / E2A Architecture

Urban Conditions and Typologies:

Market Souk / Fez / Marrakech

Courtyard RiadHousing / Marrakech / Fez

Corrala / Madrid

Ports Commerce and Power / Algeciras / Tangier / Cadiz / Gibraltar

Symbolic PalacePower / Madrid

Alcázar / Southern Spain / Northern Africa

Old City Medina / Rabat vs. Fez

Casco historico / Madrid vs Toledo

Land Desert / Almeria / Sahara

Borders Political and Geographic / Ceuta / Gibraltar / Tarifa

Infrastructure Water / Segovia

Religious / EVERYWHERE

syllabus gibraltar 2012 taubman college architectural ... · this page: granada and fez - two...

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