Our studio provides an environment for contemplation on how to place and design buildings of all sorts of typologies, on how a city should be designed, how a landscape should be formed. Our assignments are always complex challenges that initiate a joint search for a student and a teacher. The challenges of asking questions and finding answers to them. Finding the right tools for expressing ideas, visions and anything that can be included under the collective term of architectural services.
We look at architectural and urban design as a complex and multi-layered matter that interconnects morphological, perceptual, social, visual, functional, and temporal dimensions (Carmona and Tiesdell, 2007).
Our goal is to make sure the way we work in our studio connects to the reality of a practitioner’s work, which is always influenced by numerous external factors and carries a large amount of responsibility. For that, we follow the principles of critical reflection:
Know what? - Active knowledge stemming from a detailed study of the place, where analyses are not displays of data but facilitators of the search for the starting points of the design.
So what? - Finding the context and the meaning of knowledge, awareness of the impacts of decisions taken by the architect in the course of his work.
Now what? - A set of steps and actions that lead to the achievement of the goal, the goal of creating a design for a place and for a client.
The semester consists of four equal phases: discovery, development, production, communication. The work in the studio includes weekly presentations aimed at supporting the students in developing the skill of getting their ideas across clearly and professionally, an essential skill for a successful job of an architect. Furthermore, we emphasise physical models as a means of communicating the design, not just displaying it.
We are looking forward to your initiative and enthusiasm.
Radek, Zdenka
