The approach to water that emerges as the backbone of this year's studio establishes connections that do not rely exclusively on sustainable or ecological values currently almost exclusively attributed to this element. Rather, it will specifically address how its use, volume, trajectory sensorial effects and relationship to other functions can structure, explain, transform and enhance a building and to what extent it can help to highlight the haptic experience which architects like Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa or Peter Zumthor point out, another dimension that in our opinion generally has been lost today. Of course in those urban programs covering larger expenses of land, environmental values necessarily come into play but this studio course is also based on how to use water as a sensitive tool to trigger poetic resonances in the experience of architecture. As Steven Holl says: "we might think that water is a "phenomenological lens" with reflecting, space reversal, refracting and transforming powers for the rays of light". Architecture will be seen as an object that mediates between the sky and the earth, a tool interposed along the path traced by the rain through the air into the ground. The climate in Sao Paulo and its rainy seasons must be seen as the key factor to develop and shape architecture, from the domestic scale to the urban scale. Thus, the design work of both semesters will eventually arrive at the same working scale, but from different approaches: the first semester (S > M > L); the second semester (XXL > XL > L).
The role of water as a “phenomenological lens” and its interaction with architecture and our senses is discarded in a society that increasingly leaves less and less room for “live” experiences and more and more for “virtual” experiences. Digital media and globalisation are able to diminish distances, thus offering a bigger and wider world, but paradoxically, a more superficial one and one without material experiences, curiously, a phenomenon of all times. In 1825, at the end of his life, Goethe wrote a letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter: "My dear friend, nowadays everything is ultra, everything has a continuing relevance in both the way we think and the way we act. Nobody knows himself, no one knows the element that he works on and evolves or the subject which he handles... a great deal of pressure is exerted on young people who are then dragged into a maelstrom; all the things that the world admires and looks for is richness and speed; rail, express mail, steamboats and communication services are the means that the developed world uses to move forward and what makes the world to be stuck in mediocrity".
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