Q: WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN APHEX TWIN AIRBNB'S O.M. UNGERS' HOUSE?
A: ...
ARCHITECTS WITHOUT QUALITIES
In this studio, we focus on the complex impact of contemporary visual cultures on working±being. We connect the thorough practice of incremental conceptual work with the ominous but very pervasive culture of the (scroll)surface. What’s a Snowflake gotta do? We will recognize, embrace and design post-millennial ways of enquiry and action, to work in our time. We will merge into a collective, and absorb and radiate the complexities of being (anti-)architects, drowning in the surface. As we engage with our surrounding cultures, we will actively explore their underlying strategies and adopt them for our practices. These practices entail the ecologic, societal, political, technologic and economic role of architects, beyond a responsibility and relevance to the built environment.

The studio is an experiment in collective building, to embrace and engage in agencies that pierce the pictures of ourselves, our projects and our discipline. We phase as follows: SURFACE SCAN - SPEED TRIP - COLLECTIVE - PROVOCATIONS
We work as a collective in which smaller groups can exist, merge, multiply. The end result of the studio is the collective itself, established by means of a designed and executed project. SPEED TRIP
The studio undertakes a deep experiment with strategies of surrender and subversion, in order to devise alternative modes of practice for architects to exist at the surface that is today’s context — and to be able contribute to it. To understand and interact with this new landscape, Paradigm Weekly provides new tools for new times. One instrument is SPEED TRIP, a field trip-performance that previously has been executed from Los Angeles to Beijing. As a SPEED TRIPPER, you embrace the superficiality you’re investigating, and you take selfies rather than samples. Field research becomes safari. To kick off the studio, we will design and execute such a performative study trip (location tbd collectively), and use its after-images to design speculative projects and corresponding attitudes.

COLLECTIVE
Also, we will find accelerating confidence by designing our studio team itself - as a collective. We will learn to operate behind a mask, not to hide, but affording ourselves the flexibility of a persona, to explicitly provoke the discipline and explore alternative moods and roles for becoming architects. The collective consists is divided into divisions. Three divisions are proposed: Tech, Hype & Bling. The division names stem from the music industry, and loosely refer to the audio engineers, the managers and the producers. Each division invests in a selective field of operations, to boost collective, accelerated productivity. Divisions also serve as auto-critical entities: meta-engineers, meta-managers and meta-producers. The questions that arise from their work will provide triggers for self-imposed studio briefs.

PARADIGM WEEKLY LIVE
We will work towards a final act of the collective, which will be executed in public. Online, IRL, hybrid, tapping into the networks of students, guests and tutors.

MISANTHROPOZINE
Paradigm Weekly publishes a Cool-Critical journal: MISANTHROPOZINE. Our studio work - our katalysing SPEED TRIP, our designed collective with its projects - may incite the future MISANTHROPOZINE ‘problem’.

ADDITIONAL POWER
PW Studio coincides with the Masters in Art & Architecture elective TUNING (Ghent), its sister from another mother. Both share strategies and convictions, and combined would supercharge your semester.

* “The English dictionary defines “snowflake” as a derogatory term to describe an easily offended person, or someone who believes they are entitled to special treatment on account of their supposedly unique characteristics. Members of the so-called “snowflake generation” are typecast as emotionally weak and lacking resilience.” But, setting aside the negative connotations and stigmatising tactics of generalizing and labeling generations, what is possible if we reclaim exactly those characteristics as the driving qualities for agency?

#postmillennialstudio #performance #fashion #aesthetics #misanthropocene #radicalsaturation #speedtrip #questionsnotanswers #dondaism

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KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture
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