STUDIO SNOWFLAKE
Master Dissertation Studio

How do you work in your time to be in your time? In this master dissertation studio, we focus on the complex impact of contemporary visual and discursive cultures on working±being. We connect the so-called thorough practice of incremental conceptual work with the seemingly ominous but very pervasive culture of the (scroll)surface. What’s a Snowflake* gotta do? Towards graduation, we will detect, embrace and design post-millennial ways of enquiry and action. To work in your time, you absorb and radiate the complexities of becoming (anti-)architects, drowning in visual culture. Engaging with these visual cultures, you will actively explore their underlying strategies and adopt them for your practice. This practices may involve the ecologic, societal, political, technologic and economic role of architects, beyond a responsibility and relevance to the built environment.
Simon Denny, Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace,” 2016), 2019

Your work will be formatted according to its embedded, extra-architectural realities, and from there respond to your ‘discipline’. The outcome might therefore take the shape of a site- and time-specific building, performance, mixtape, manifesto, clothing line, uncorporate identity, or a combination of these. Individual projects will be executed as part of a collective experiment: to assemble, let surface, ferment, collide, massage different attitudes and different contexts as embodied in the work of its contributors.
MSCHF x INRI Air Max 97 Custom, 2019

STUDIO SNOWFLAKE believes we are critical agents, and produce questions rather than answers. But we also believe this benefits from a rather cool approach. To combine these would be the core of our work: Cool Criticality.
FONDAZIONE NADA, Application Form, 2020

STUDIO SNOWFLAKE sequels Master Studio Paradigm Weekly: Architects Without Qualities. Both share strategies and convictions, and combined would supercharge your graduation year. Architects Without Qualities focusses on collective agency to pierce dream pictures of practice, but also to crack the paralysis of criticality + cynicism.

STUDIO SNOWFLAKE also coincides with a publication: MISANTHROPOZINE collectively experiments with visual architectural culture, and engages the millennial and superficial sensibilities of the personae that are part of it— artists, architects, thinkers and policy makers. Each issue establishes and dissolves a fresh paradigm, a potential exit route away from disciplinary cults. The collective landscape of our projects may incite the future MISANTHROPOZINE ‘problem’.

STUDIO SNOWFLAKE is open for 4 students, who work on individual projects. To apply, please send your motivation, including an overview of relevant work, to pieterjan.ginckels@kuleuven.be #millennialstudio #performance #fashion #aesthetics #misanthropocene #radicalsaturation #speedtrip #questionsnotanswers

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Partners:
CIVA
KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture
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