UG2
Sprezzatura Damjan Iliev, Javier Ruiz
Year 2 Yihan (Zara) Chen, Wing (Melody) Chu, Hanadi Izzuddin, Jaejun Kim, Aleksandra Kugacka, Rachel Lee, Niraj Shah, Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu Year 3 Yan Ho (Brian) Cheung, Hilda Hiong, Ning (Yi) Lui , Minesh Patel, Tobias Petyt, Sze (Viola) Poon, Joanna Rzewuska, Meng (Tony) Zhao The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Thank you to our consultants and critics: Richard Beckett, Isaïe Bloch, Harry Bucknall, Mathew Butcher, Marjan Colletti, Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Yael Riesner, Bob Sheil, David Storring and Barry Wark
One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it. The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione, 1528 This year UG2 explored spaces for living and socialising in the future using time-based tools and advanced 3D modelling computation techniques driven by emergent paradigms in digital design. We emphasised the use of Sprezzatura, a courtier’s most valuable skill, also defined as nonchalance, studied carelessness or well- rehearsed naturalness. The focus was on demonstrating how the perfect courtier, in order to behave with Sprezzatura, uses strategies of rhetoric and deceit and how these behavioural strategies and techniques can be reconfigured to drive a contemporary design methodology using advanced digital tools. From Form to Formation In Term 1, we familiarised ourselves with the concept of Sprezzatura through a series of task-specific workshops which investigated parallel digital and spatial design strategies in architecture. We decoded the underlining principles of this socio-cultural behaviour and used them to inform and customise specific computational techniques to explore concepts such as intricacy, redundancy, exuberance and excess. The design task was to propose a series of inhabitable spaces/fragments in Rome. The function and context of our proposals were dependent on individual preference, however, they all needed to exemplify the tension that Sprezzatura provides such as: complex vs. simple; extravagant vs. plain; redundant vs. essential; eccentric vs. balanced; intricate vs. smooth; explicit vs. ambiguous; formed vs. amorphous. At the same time we discussed the contemporary confrontation between design mediums (manual, intuitive) and automatic tools (algorithmic). From Formation to Ecosystem During Terms 2 and 3 we designed a public Villa hybridised with additional programmes sited in Rome, Venice or Florence. The design process began by criticising the typology of the Villa and proposing new radical possibilities of inhabitation. We re-examined housing as a body of formal and behavioural possibilities, triggering new and innovative opportunities for the design of living and socialising spaces. The control, rigour and precision of some of our techniques would interlock with the redundancy, vagueness and ambiguity that others produce. Sprezzatura, by nature, is an art of dissimulation and a process of communication whose extreme application will hyper-polarise the output, from which will emerge a new ‘ego’, or in our case, a new architectural typology; an emergent architectural persona.
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