A house and workshop designed for a craftsman around a hypothetical urban piazza, as part of an autonomous work-live square and community.
Learning from the New York Five, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier, this studio’s emphasis was on their principals of formalism and architectural drawings as manifestos. The studio began with the analysis of these architects’ work, specifically their small-scale residential projects, focusing on and revealing the formal abstractions, spatial relationships and compositions within each project. As the group used drawings as means to communicate their manifestos, the students were encouraged to create drawings that emphasized geometrical explorations, axonometric projections and diagrammatic representations to convey the analyzed concepts and later their own conceptual intentions in the design of a house.
Each student was assigned a plot on a given hypothetical piazza for their intervention. The house they were to design on the plot, was meant for an artisan of their choice. With the study of the artisan’s production process the students came to understand the workshop’s spatial requirements and extracted formal concepts pertaining to the dweller’s art. Both programmatically and formally the challenge was in exploring the relationship between the domestic space and the workspace, the community/piazza and the interiority of the house, and between their formal concepts and the functional articulations, achieving an inspired and comprehensive balance between these conditions.