academic design studios
This is the work of Design Studio 4 - a Masters design studio operating under the Oxford Brookes School of Architecture RIBA Part 2 Masters programme (MArchD) where studio founder, Louise, assisted as Design Tutor.
Here you will find a summary of the studios interests, research and work during the academic year of 2018-2019 within the city of Skopje, Macedonia.
Design Tutors;
Professor Nicholas Boyarsky (lead) | Jason Coleman | Louise Cann
Technology Tutors;
Barti Garibaldo | Jason Coleman
Thank you to our critics and hosts;
Damjan Kokalevski | Katie Reilly | Skopje School of Architecture
Student Awards;
RIBA Silver Medal Nominee 2019 Yen Shook Yap
AJ Student Award Nominee 2019 Abdulhaq Ahmadzai
DS4’s interests are based on a direct physical engagement with the city and architecture, and a commitment to thinking through making. We site our research in the Baltikans project, a collaborative exploration of the former communist controlled fringe of the Baltics and the Balkans. The project has to date worked in Estonia, Mostar, and Sarajevo in Bosnia Herzegovina, with students from Sweden, Finland, Bosnia and the Stalker Group from Rome. This year we worked in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia and the site of the major earthquake in 1963.
Our studio ethos requires close contact with cities and collaboration and dialogue with key players and issues on the ground. We will work with local NGOs, City Creative and Reactor-Research in Action, in Skopje and we will be holding a workshop in collaboration with City Creative and local students of architecture. The workshop, ‘Memory Games - Urban Identities’, will be immersive and performative.
The studio’s work is focussed on crafting material and fictional narratives in the fast moving present where new alliances and divisions are emerging which are blurring memories, and politicising identities. We work at different scales, from infrastructural landscapes to detailed observations of material transformations. We focus on how narratives and material propositions can forge new relationships with the anthropocene.
Projects are based on researching the rich and diverse urban landscapes of Skopje. Students were asked to explore and catalogue the interfaces between the natural conditions of the site, the historic city, the infrastructures and visionary socialist architectures of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the reconstruction led by Kenzo Tange and the Metabolists, and the international effort to provide temporary housing.
Students engaged directly with the current, fast moving city, notably the ‘Skopje 2014’ project which is pasting over the modernist and global vision of the former socialist city with populist and nationalist pastiche, and resistance to this from a younger generation of activists. Current uncontrolled neo-liberal developments (‘turbo architecture’) will be contrasted with the rituals and iconography of the ancient Bogomils, with Islamic traditions of architecture and city building, and the contingent city that has developed will be measured against the aspirations and search for identity of the Macedonians met.
We studied the visionary architectural works of Konstantinov, Grabul, and Biro71 as well as Kenzo Tange, to provide a context for our work.
Images
In order of appearance; Abdulhaq Ahmadzai © | Georgia-Marina Andreou © | Anthony Sadler © | Robert Goacher © | Yen Shook Yap ©
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