COMPOSTELAs summer program Philosophy

Architecture summer program

INTRODUCTION. PHILOSOPHY, Compostelas.

THE CITY, Santiago de Compostela.

THE SCHOOL, Monastery San Martín Pinario.

PROGRAM: Tours + Lecturers + Studios.

FACULTY STUDENTS LIFE IN COMPOSTELA

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INTRODUCTION The Compostela Institute offers an intensive three-week architectural summer program in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in which students attend lectures and seminars, visit major works of architecture from the Middle Ages to the present, participate in building workshops and round-table discussions with prominent international architects and historians, and complete three design projects that attempt to resolve current problems in the city. The Institute places a strong emphasis on educating students in the tectonics of design, the craft of making and hand drawing, inter-disciplinary collaboration, and sensitivity towards the physical and local social environment.

The Institute is an independent institution, supported by the University of Santiago de Compostela and the Municipality of Santiago. Beginning in 2010, 20-30 students from all over the world have participated each summer, representing roughly 15 different nations, in what is now becoming a close family of Compostela teachers and alumni. Our community includes the active participation of such distinguished figures as Alvaro Siza, William JR Curtis, Juhani Pallasmaa, ManuelGallego, and David Chipperfield.

The program is open to students at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels in architecture and all related disciplines, including landscape architecture, history, historic preservation, urban design, interior design, and the building crafts.

The program aims to integrate students in the context of the city, to experience walking, travelling, and living among architectural masterpieces, immersed in the region’s ambiance and traditions.

Galicia’s rich historical heritage, mixed with many fine examples of contemporary work and an overwhelming natural landscape of granite cliffs, winding rias and estuaries, encourage students to forget all that has been “learned” and to return to a direct and essential experience of architecture, with its fundamental materials and techniques. There will be a simultaneous understanding of the theoretical and the applied, whereby students will fully engage in the creative process, getting back to intentions, thought, drawing, guided by deep understanding of place.

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PHILOSOPHY The Compostela Institute program acts as a laboratory to explore new directions in architectural education. It is our belief, that for architecture to remain relevant in this time of uncertainty and change, it will need to reposition itself in relation to economic and social forces, to engage directly with the communities that it serves, and to resist specialization and fragmentation by connecting itself in meaningful ways with history, culture, tradition, ecology, the building crafts, and other related disciplines.

While it is clear that many characteristics of a summer school cannot be replicated in a full-year architectural program, the Compostela Institute aims to suggest new ideas for a more project-based, experiential, collaborative, and interdisciplinary educational model, which could be adapted and implemented in schools of architecture in other parts of the world. The teaching philosophy of the Compostela Institute can be summarized in the following 7 points: 1. Research: The school acts as a laboratory in which interdisciplinary research is fully integrated with and informs design thinking.

2. City as a School/Community - The program is rooted in Santiago de Compostela and learning extends beyond the classroom into the city. Design projects, developed in collaboration with the town council and local specialists, are seen as a way to give back to the city and aim to solve real problems.

3. Collaboration/Diversity: Internationally recognized theorists and practitioners represent a great variety of philosophies in architecture, which are shared through open dialogue and debate. The program experience is focused on intense collaboration between teachers and students, both inside and outside the classroom.

4. Craft/Tectonics: Drawings and models crafted by hand are encouraged in the studio. The program values an experiential approach to architecture, focusing on the fundamental skills of an architect.

5. Travel: Simultaneously with lectures and design workshops offered throughout the city, travel outside of Santiago de Compostela provides the direct experience of architecture, both ancient and modern, to allow students to develop a deeper understanding of buildings, their tectonic complexity, and relationship to place.

6. Global/Local: The school hosts an international community of students and distinguished guests in an intimately local context: The program has as one of its aims the dissemination of knowledge about Galicia’s heritage, with guests and alumni invited to continue their collaboration with the program in the years to come.

7. Living Architecture: The making of architecture is understood as a craft which involves all of the senses and life activities which immerse the student in local culture and spontaneous events: food, play, participation in the rituals and traditions of Galicia all provide a connection with the community and local life.

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THE CITY OF ALL ARCHITECTURES: SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA A defining characteristic of the program is that it is rooted in Santiago de Compostela, declared a World Heritage City by UNESCO. COMPOSTELAs leverages the city of Santiago de Compostela as an architectural laboratory - firstly to learn from its excellent historical and contemporary architectural tradition, and, secondly, to reflect on its urban complexity.

As a living example, the city allows students to interact with and learn from architectural experiences.

The city of Santiago de Compostela is known for the St. James pilgrimage that culminates in its cathedral, and the students in this program will participate in a sort of “architectural pilgrimage” to buildings by Peter Eisenman, Alvaro Siza, John Hejduk, Grassi, Kleiheus in addition to works by leading Spanish architects such as those of Viaplana , Noguerol and Manuel Gallego.

Santiago de Compostela, a prilgrimage destination since the Middle Ages.

Santiago de Compostela was declared a World Heritage City by UNESCO in 1985, in view of its urban beauty and monumental integrity, as well as the profound echoes of its spiritual significance as an apostolic sanctuary and the destination of the Middle Ages’ most important religious and cultural movement: the Way of St. James pilgrimage. Santiago de Compostela has been a pilgrimage destination since the Middle Ages. The legend that St.James found his way to the Iberian peninsula, and had preached there, is one of a number of early traditions concerning the missionary activities and final resting places of the apostles of Jesus.

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SCHOOL: CLASSROOMS & STUDIO SPACE Particularly relevant to any program in architecture is the space in which teaching takes place.

Monastery of San Martin Pinario The Monastery of San Martin Pinario is the place where all the COMPOSTELAs activities –Open Lectures, Seminars, Dialogues, among others– would take place. It is also the space that hosts the CA Critical Seminars and Subjects.The monastery consists of two cloisters: the Office and the Porter, made in the eighteenth century. Outside, highlights the main facade, designed by Fray Gabriel de las Casas. Its privileged location is in the heart of Santiago, behind the Cathedral.

We understand the entire city of Santiago de Compostela as one of the best possible classrooms and so we have distributed the spaces in which the program takes place throughout the city: the studios are in the historic old city, the seminars in university facilities, and the lectures in the auditoriums of Eisenman’s City of Culture or in Siza’s Contemporary Art Center of Galicia. In this way the students are encouraged to experience the city in a more complex way, through first hand experiences with architecture of different periods and ideologies. Also important to the program’s teaching methodology is the housing of students within the same university dorm, so that the interaction between our international group of students extends beyond the classroom. The dorm is also the site for informal conferences and film screenings.

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PROGRAM TOURS + LECTURES+STUDIOS These visits to buildings and construction sites will be guided by scholars and architects so that students gain both a critical understanding of the architecture and a first-hand knowledge of the tectonics of building. It is this simultaneous understanding of the theoretical and the applied in architecture that is the focus of this program.

The program will integrate students in the historical context of the city of Santiago de Compostela, to experience walking, travelling, and living among architectural masterpieces.

Best of all, students will be working in the context of an old city, walking the mostly pedestrian network of medieval streets and enjoying the social life of Santiago de Compostela’s university town atmosphere. Students will not only benefit from the critical thinking and technical expertise of the program’s instructors but will also partake in the regions’s traditions and experience the socio-cultural context of this wonderful city.

In addition, this program will focus on issues of sustainability in contemporary architecture. Lectures and seminars will discuss new technologies and new approaches to create more sustainable buildings within a new context. These different dimensions of learning will be smoothly integrated into a single coherent educational program, complemented by the spiritual experience of own architectural pilgrimage.

The political dimensions of architecture will be addressed as well. The government of Santiago de Compostela has made social equity and environmental consciousness priorities for the city, and in three short charrettes for three small design projects, students will get a chance to test the tectonic knowledge and sustainability insight they have gained through the seminars and lectures of the program.

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The program greatly values incorporating socio-cultural concerns in its teaching of architecture. We envision two avenues toward this end: DIALOGUE and COMMUNICATION. DIALOGUE is understood as the active participation in the program of different Galician institutions.

This insures a direct engagement with the local context in which the program exists.

It is in the program’s relationship with these institutions that the projects completed by the students are defined. Specifically, Santiago’s Mayor’s office and the Professional Association for Architects in Galicia are consulted regarding the definition and character of the projects developed each year.

COMPOSTELAs aims to be in constant dialogue with the community that hosts the program in two ways: through public lectures and conferences take on and bring to light current urban issues, and through the publication of design projects developed in the program’s studios.

We understand the publication of these projects developed by teams of students and professors as a way to give back to the city. We also understand this relationship with the city as fundamental to the public goals of a university and to the training of young architects.

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Selected Lectures and Seminars: On 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Santiago de Compostela: On Santiago and Its Urban Development - Luis Dalda 1.

Santiago - A Space Through Different Ideologies - F. Agrasar 2.

Santiago: The Contemporary City - Fernando Agrasar 3.

Cloisters and Their Meaning - A.Goy Diz 4.

Santiago: The History of the City - Lopez Alsina 5.

Santiago and Its Materiality - F.Salinas 6.

The City of Culture by Peter Eisenman - Maria Sieira 7.

An Artist’s Interventions in the City - Fernando Agrasar 8.

Construction and Tectonics: New Systems of Construction - C. Quintans Void and Construction - C.Quintans New Technologies in Construction- C.Quintans Sustainable Architecture - A.Foyo The Tectonics of Design - A.Perez-Mendez Architecture and Its Materiality: Stone - Coira Stone Work - F.Salinas Systems of Architectural Design - Inaki Leite

On 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

5.

6.

Landscape: On The St.James Pilgrimage Route - C.S.Carretero 1.

Galicia: Landscape and Archeology - C.Otero and F.Criado 2.

Memory, Identity and Landscape - P. Gallego Picard Landscape and the New Modern - T. Berger 3.

Landscape and Ideology - López Sandez 4.

Art and Architecture - Juhani Pallasmaa Platform and Horizon - William JR Curtis

Light, Environment, and Human Perception: Light in The Architecture of Le Corbusier- W.Curtis Platforms, Terraces and Ramps in Ancient and Modern Architecture- William JR Curtis Abstraction and Light - William JR Curtis Atmospheres - Juhani Pallasmaa

On Design On 1. The Museum at Ibere Camargo and Its Design Process - A. Siza 1. (followed by a conversation with students at the town market) 2.

2. The Design of a Summer House in Corrubedo - David Chipperfield 3.

3. Sectional Thinking - Andrew Cohen

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Architecture in Europe and Asia: Face City - Fulvio Irace Modern Architecture in China - Hua Li Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Swiss Arch. - J.Gubler

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Conversations with Students: 1. Alvaro Siza - Conversation with Students (Auditorium at the School of Journalism) (San Martin Pinario Lecture Hall, Santiago de Compostela) 2. Alvaro Siza - Lunch with Students (Town Market in Santiago de Compostela) (San Martin Pinario, Santiago de Compostela) 3. David Chipperfield - Conversation with Students (House in Corrubedo, Spain) (Plaza Quintana, Santiago de Compostela) 4. William JR Curtis - Conversation with Students (Fonseca Residence Hall, South Campus of the University) 5. Juhani Pallasmaa - Conversation with Students (Cafe on Praca Fonseca, Santiago de Compostela) 6. Round-table Discussion with A.Foyo, J.Pallasmaa, C.Seoane (Boa Nova Tea House and Serralves Museum) 7. Discussion with Hua Li 8. Juhani Pallasmaa in Conversation with Students 9. Presentation of Work by Faculty and Discussion 10. T. Berger Conversations with Students in Porto

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FOUNDING FACULTY: Tatiana Berger

Ms.Berger has a B.A. in Architecture from UC Berkeley and a Master’s Degree in Architecture from Princeton University. She has practiced architecture for 15 years in the U.S., Russia, Austria, and Portugal. She worked as project manager for ILF Engineers on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and for Baumschlager and Eberle on residential projects and international competitions. From 1997-2004 she collaborated with Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza on the design and construction of multiple projects in Iberia, including the reconstruction of the historic Chiado district in Lisbon and the new public library in Viana de Castelo. Since 2008, she is a professor at the Boston Architectural College, Roger Williams University, and the Wentworth Institute of Technology.

Alberto Foyo

Alberto Foyo Studied architecture in Madrid,Spain and the University of Oregon, USA. He collaborated with the Austrian architect Dr. Roland Rainer developing low rise-high density residential enclaves and later opened his practice in NYC. His projects include residential developments in Spain and Florida, a master plan for Kiev, an agroforestry & permaculture center in the Amazon basin and residences in the New York region. He is involved as professor, guest critic, and lecturer in Europe, China, and America. He teaches at the School of Architecture, City College and at Columbia University in New York.

Oscar Fuertes

Oscar Fuertes studied architecture in Coruña, Spain and the Accademia della Architettura di Mendrisio, Switzerland. He has a master’s degree from Coruña University. He is a member of the Spanish Commission for the exhibition Architetti Ticinesse nel Mondo.

He collaborates with CSA and with the COAG - Galician Association of Architects- on the European project »Dorna”.

Pablo Gallego

Architect, photographer and filmmaker. Co-director of the art&architecture magazine O-monografías. Graduated from Madrid Architecture Polytechnics School. He has collaborated with Ábalos &Herreros, D.Chipperfield Architects, M. Gallego, Stan Allen and Tuñon and Mansilla. He has a Master of Science from the GSAPP, Columbia University NY, is recipient of the William Kinne Fellows Award in 2000 and the Europan 8 first prize at Coimbra, Portugal. His practice has work in London, New York and Galicia, Spain, and has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, XXX Pontevedra Art Biennale, CGAC in S.Compostela and Arquerias Nuevos Ministerios, Madrid.

Carlos Seoane

Mr.Seoane has a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Santiago, 1987 and a Master’s degree from Columbia University, 1991. He has also completed post-graduate studies at the Escola das Artes e Design, in Porto. Since 1996, he is Associate Professor of Construction at Coruña University School of Architecture.In the United States, he worked with R. Viñoly Architects.

In 1993, he moved to Porto to collaborate with A. Siza. He opened his own studio in 1997 and since then has also collaborated with D. Chipperfield and with Eisenman Architects. He has received the CGAC Award 2002, Association of Architects award for best rehabilitation project in 2001-2, Juana de Vega Award, 2010 for the best Galician House. CA institute Director and Compostela´s summer program since 2010.

Maria Sieira

Mrs.Sieira coordinates the Housing Studio and the Architecture History/Theory sequence in the graduate program at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture. She teaches architecture design studios that focus on sustainable urban projects and seminars on film and on installation art. She is a registered architect in New York State and in 2007 founded Xoguete Architecture, a critical practice firm that provides architectural services and is engaged in design research. She worked on the Cidade da Cultura, in Santiago de Compostela, while at Eisenman Architects, NY

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COMPOSTELAs 2010 11 12 Students 2010 : Alfredo Pimentel.

Ana Gonzalez Granja.

Anna Kulik.

Bruno Neto.

Bryan Kistner.

Colin Booth.

Chung Z. Zhao.

Danilo Marini.

Elizabeth Kay. Grant Scott.

Jennifer Caras Kathryn Hovis.

Lauren Fallisi.

Marek Kundrata.

Mario Somonte.

Mark Rego.

Michael Deng Lin. Olga Prokopenko.

Ravie Bath.

Reed Harmon.

Robin Willcox.

Kelly Shaw.

Zachary Briggs.

Students 2011: Adryanne Quenneville.

Bob Burgess.

Camille Milou.

David Deitch.

Filipo Puleo.

Holy Arnold.

Jackie Tugman.

Jin Park.

Laura Schneider.

Levi Tofias.

Michael Del Valle.

Sean Owen.

Tayssir Takieddine.

Timoteo D´Alessandro.

Toan D.B. Nguyen.

Trevor Hughes.

Vladimir Gusev.

Zane Bell.

Students 2012 Alejandro Leal_Mexico Alzbeta Bruhova_Czechoslovakia Anh Tu Tran_Vietnam Benan Sahin_Turkey Donald Barany_US Geng Xinxin_China Hu Rong_China Jamie Edindjiklian_US Javier Solis_Mexico Jordan Fust_US Rabab Kazem_Kuwait Magda Jankowska_Poland/US Ewelina Olechowska_Poland Pablo Lopez Prol_Spain Nguyen_Vietnam Scott Brown_US Scott Woodward_US Yuki He_China Shih-Ning Chou_Taiwan/US Tanya Zimmerli_US Tate Sumner_US Veronica Velasquez_Columbia/US Xian Yu Yang_China Yingxia Lai (deLyn)_China/US Yishan Qin_China

Guest Lecturers:

Vito Acconci, David Chipperfield, Andrew Cohen, William J.R. Curtis, Jacques Gubler, Fulvio Irace, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alvaro Siza.

Lecturers: Fernando Agrasar, Felipe Criado, Elias Cueto, José Fernández Salas, Iñaki Leite, Fernando López Alsina, María López Sandez, Carlos Otero, José Otero Pombo, Alfonso Pérez-Méndez, Carlos Quintáns, Edite Rosa, Felix Salinas.

Cristina Sánchez.

Guest critics 2010:

Guest critics 2011:

Guest critics 2012:

Faculty:

William J.R. Curtis, Oleg Drozdov, Antonio Maroño, Sara Murado, Edite Rosa.

Gerardo Conde Roa, Angel Curras, William J.R. Curtis, Xerardo Estevez, Martín Fdz. Prado, Antonio Maroño, Juhani Pallasmaa, Edite Rosa.

Fernando Agrasar, Angel Curra, William J.R. Curtis, Francisco Durán.

Beatriz Gónzalez, Jaques Gubler, Hua Li, Antonio Maroño, Edite Rosa.

Tatiana Berger, Alberto Foyo, Oscar Fuertes, Pablo Gallego, Carlos Seoane, Maria Sieira.

Student nationalities: 2010: 12|2011:14|2012:11

Home institutions: 2010: 11|2011:12|2012:16

Assistants: Lucia Buceta, Carmen Fabregat, Jackie Tugman, Tono Mejuto.

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Excerpt from essay “Chipperfield on the Beach and Other Compostelas“ by Maria Sieira.

One warm breezy summer morning, a couple dozen architecture students and professors from the Compostela Institute summer program travelled to the Galician coast to visit David Chipperfield’s summer house. It was a treat to get inside the house, which on one side perches on a small beach, and on the other squeezes between other houses crowding the tortuous old main street. It was also a treat to be hosted by the architect and his family, with plenty of jamón and local fresh cheese, and to linger at the table musing about the strange exaggerated program of a summer house: the usual trappings of our busy lives are absent, we parcel out a bit of office time to keep our regular lives elsewhere going, but mostly we are occupied with new concerns, such as how to keep sand out of the house (in the case of Chipperfield’s house a shower is matter-of-factly introduced between the entrance from the beach and the rest of the house).

The reference for the title of this essay is Robert Wilson’s operatic work «Einstein on the Beach», his collaboration with the composer Philip Glass that resulted in a radical new kind of opera. Wilson and Glass set out to place a major historical figure in quotidian contexts so that the opera becomes a poetic portrayal of a personage rather than the more typical grandiose historical narrative. Similarly, Compostela Institute is a program founded with the purpose of offering an alternative architectural experience to the contemporary architecture studio. The faculty, teaching in Europe and North America during the rest of the year, spend the summers getting the students in the program to slow down and slowing down with them; to produce architecture, yes, but to delay the grand gesture in favor of the accumulated moments arising out of quotidian, less abstract, more directly experienced environments.

Chipperfield’s summer house and other sites visited (as well as the students and faculty themselves...) are literally on the beach, and this leisure context is an important component of the program. The Galician cultural context—the beaches, the coasts, the food, the holiday proces-

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sions and street festivals - act as a kind of priming device for the pedagogical goals of the program. Galicia is the distant corner of the Iberian Peninsula, until recently with limited transportation access and visitors, save for the committed pilgrims arriving at the tomb of St. James in Santiago’s cathedral. And, going further back, Galicia is the home of Finisterre, the finis terrae, the pre-Columbian end of the earth. In part because of its distant location and in part because of Galicia’s particular socio-political history, Santiago and its region doesn’t just offer museumized Galician culture, but rather a living, thriving lifestyle with deep connections to the past. The preparation and consumption of food (and in particular of the incredibly rich array of seafood that comes out of the Galician bays) is equally ceremonial for the rural peasant as it is for the urban intellectual. In both cases primitive means continue to be used - large cauldrons of boiling water, dry pine needles smoldering under a grill—and not out of some sense of returning to authenticity in a modern world as it might be the case in the United States (the organic farm movement, for example), but simply because, well, the food prepared in this way is delicious.

I have had more than one young architecture student in New York tell me that for all the effort that goes into the arrangement of actual, physical space in the course of a professional architecture program, the contemporary environment of young people today revolves around the luminous screen of a computer device. If Compostela Institute has as a goal getting these young architects to engage architecture in a more direct, physical way, what better context for this pedagogy than a culture in which taking pleasure in a meal and a place is a daily habit. By the time students and faculty arrived at Chipperfield’s summer house, they had stopped being mere sightseers and had grown accustomed to their bodies and minds at rest....

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COMPOSTELAs Architecture summer program