MANUALCAD
Sofia RUIZ, Irene LANDA, Sophie RAZAIRE, Emilie CHARRIER, Léo GODEBOUT, Lambert DRAPEAU
SENSORY EXPLORATIONS #2
What do you mean by 'sensing space otherwise'?
In this session will have with us Ester Gisbert Alemany, architect and anthropologist (University of Alicante & University of Aberdeen). She will help us relate to Königsplatz in different ways, not only to sense it otherwise, but also helping to find ways to translate our sensory experiences when exploring the urban by other means than an axonometric gaze (or even without resourcing to vision).
In the afternoon session we will try out an adaptation of a ‘blindfold game’ through which we will not only search to experience the square otherwise, but also where you will learn how through synaesthesic exercises you might experience the issues and problems of having to translate space in different sensory modes.
SENSORY EXPLORATIONS #1
Gaining sense of who we are and where we come from
What's conventional, and what's unconventional for you?
For the first course, we had to bring to the class two projects (the most conventional and the weirdest ones) we have been working on in our studies or in work. We would have to present them in public for the whole group. We had to focus on explaining the others, who come from different origins and faculties why we selected them, and why they might be representative of your training and skills. It was really interesting to see how our approaches of architecture are so different according to our origins and it's a good way to understand how people work and to compare with our own practices.
"As we experiment we realize that by training, we become aware to every details which become clues to locate us"
Emilie
SENSORY EXPLORATIONS #3
Architecture as sensory play
Playing is something very serious…
In her book Architecture in Play historian of architecture Tamar Zinguer explores the importance received by architectural games and toolkits such as Meccano or building block games since the beginning of the 20th century for educational purposes, as part of the quintessential education of the modern child (for the Spanish-speaking amongst us, there are also two very interesting books by Juan Bordes on the history of architectural toys 1 | 2). However, these 'playthings' also convey a much more serious history of the role of play and playfulness in architectural practice, as part of many different approaches highlighting the importance to self-learn other ways of doing things, as well as the crucial derailments that have opened up newer approaches to space, form, construction, method, and so on. In this session, we will address, hence, the potential of architecture as sensory play. For this we'll teach each other how to play a particular 'serious game': in exploring and understanding the challenges and the promises a particular toolkit we'll learn to develop a sensory approach to how streets are made. Through play we will explore and discover newer practices through which we will try to translate different forms of feeling into others, where the role of our feet and hands will be restored. What if doing so, you might be able to learn how to design a street without the use of your sight?
SENSORY EXPLORATIONS #4
'Wake Up and Smell Your City'
Norwegian artist and chemist Sissel Tolaas, who also works as a professional smell designer, has been 'on a mission' to capture cities' smells. And, for this, she has been frantically finding out odours and searching for ways to catalogue them in small flasks or creating installations, where she creates maps of smells (smellscapes?). Indeed, she has tried to articulate 'an alphabet for the nose'.
But isn't her work presupposing that we know what we smell, or that we have words and ways to translate smells into something meaningful? Ok, let's try that. In this session we will have a commission: becoming a nose-chitect, or an architectbecoming-dog (did you know that dogs go crazy if they don't use their noses to search for, say, the stick… that is, if they become 'too visual'; so, we'll learn to think like a dog, one that speaks at least).
"During some moments of the journey, it was impossible for me to translate and describe the smells I appreciated, either because they were unfamiliar to me and I could find no adjectives to describe them or because my olfactory development was so reduced that I could not appreciate any of them."
Sofia
"I have this feeling that we are never really objective when we try to translate smells into a spoken tale because we have personal experiences which refer to some smells."
Emilie
The last sensory exploration was done with Angela Di Fiore. During this session we experimented different ways to use our body differently in the space as a communication tool. By doing different exercices as "machine", mechanisms we learned how to guide the other and tried to think about a participation process.
SENSORY EXPLORATIONS #5
Group discussion: ‘But, how to make sense from all this?’
You can find here the deliverable's requirements of the sensory explorations
Emilie
Sofia