External examiners Ruth Berktold and Titus Bernhard contributed to lively debates and awarded two Dean’s Awards to David Stieler and Bettina Siegele.
David Stieler’s thesis Embodied Homeostasis Machinic Architecture, tutored by Marjan Colletti, deals with on-site deposition processes, which will dramatically change the construction process soon. They would allow for a completely orchestrated a pre-described sequence of construction operations that are executed in each sequence. This procedure might have many benefits, such as real-time and event-driven decision-making.
The focus in David Stieler’s thesis is on creating a very basic toolbox that allows for a series of deposition techniques to be executed by multiple construction units simultaneously and in real time. Thus, the production goes beyond the act of automation and enters the realm of design itself. The role of the designer changes from creating pure form, to an engagement with a construction process based on negotiation. In this scenario, a working construction agent in the form of a quadruped was designed to create a formal language based on the constraints given by the agent itself. The act of construction should result in an ergonomic process that allows for granular steps to add up into larger structures. see project ...
Bettina Siegele achieved another Dean’s Award for her thesis Ballard and the Pineal Eye, Eine Architekturkritik an der Moderne, tutored by Bart Lootsma. The theoretical work is based on the Concrete and Steel Trilogy by the writer James Ballard: Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975). In maps and drawings, she convincingly proves that all three novels relate to real existing places and buildings near Ballard’s home in the periphery of London. Also, real events during the so-called Christmas Crisis in the Trelick Tower probably were the inspiration for High Rise. Bettina Siegele shows that Ballard’s work is an implicit critique on the city as he saw it developing in his time, and more specifically on the humanist architecture of Team X, which was dominating the discourse in Ballard’s time. She uses a range of different theoreticians, from George Bataille to Paul Preciado, to develop a new form of architectural criticism, based on Bataille’s idea of the Pineal Eye, as a dark blind spot in Western culture. Before outlining a post-humanist and feminist agenda for architectural criticism for use in contemporary architecture, she demonstrates this form of critique on several known Team X projects. see project ...