How can BLUEPRINTS inform a design process encouraging the understanding of spatial qualities, the relationship between spaces, scale, materiality, tectonics, and movement…?

In this design studio, we explored the notion of the blueprint as a data set or a matrix of information that reveals a spatial truth. It will also explore multiple methods of research and representation. A blueprint can be one drawing, or many drawings. Interestingly, a sequence of multiple drawings can refer to one floor plan, or one room, or one house. Blueprints, similar to architecture, have rules and conventions. Architectural drawing can be read as a set of ‘projections’.

The studio was structured in 2 parts; PORTRAIT OF A HOUSE and SURREAL DOMESTIC SPACE.

In the first project, the students explored how blueprints can inform a design process encouraging the understanding of spatial qualities, the relationship between spaces, scale, materiality, tectonics, and movement by portraying a house.

In the second project, students were challenged to re-define, re-present and re-interpret the idea of home, and to accommodate to a dweller’s interaction with their inhabited space who will in turn continue to re-define it. They aimed to design spaces that answer to needs, requirements, and constraints, yet beyond the functionality of the space. Students created poetic spaces that evoke emotion and re-assess conventional system by designing a house for their avatar situated on the roof of their current house.