Building An Iceberg

Didier Faustino and Kostas Grigoriadis

‘The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.’
Robert Bresson

Like an iceberg, what you see is not what you get. Everything has a hidden aspect, an internal logic or system or mechanism that is richer than the image outwardly projected. The aim of this unit is to work on the notion of the iceberg and to use it to develop an architectural project.

The structure of the unit will be divided into three phases: research, production and exhibition. In the first phase, students will work individually to build up their body of references and their personal definition of an iceberg. Each week a collection of material – such as texts, films and other media – will be provided and discussed to help nourish individual research, which will then be elaborated through intuitive and experimental processes. Among this corpus, specific terms should be thoroughly explored: appropriation, diversion, flesh/bones, fragile/ solid, legal/illegal, lure/manipulation, soft/hard, visible/invisible. At the end of this phase students will have to produce a theoretical design project – taking the form of a text, a film, an object, a performance or some other abstract architectural project – that will express their full understanding of the iceberg as metaphor.

In the second phase, students will design an architectural project using the preceding theory as a paradigm. Although a site will be provided, the students will have to define their own programme. Teamwork will allow students to combine skills and knowledge and produce common tools – models, analyses, etc. At the end of this phase all students will have an empirical architectural project.

In the third phase, these empirical and theoretical projects will be synthesised into one. Students will define the representation and the transmission of their project, and will clarify what the best tools are to communicate the complexity of their work in as clear a manner as possible. At the end of this phase all student projects will be presented in a unit exhibition.

A jury will be held in each phase, accompanied by a special guest: a theoretician (first phase), an artist (second phase) and a curator (third phase). A unit trip to Paris during the research phase will be organised, along with seminars and a series of visits to expose students to different types of display, research and production across various disciplines.

Unit Staff

Didier Faustino is an architect by education and explores the relationships between architecture and the arts, between body and space.

His approach is multifaceted, from artistic installations to experimentation, from creating subversive visual artworks to spaces designed as a tool for exacerbating our senses and sharpening our awareness of reality.

Kostas Grigoriadis studied at the Bartlett and the AA’s Design Research Laboratory. He is currently co-designing a mixed-use development in India and is pursuing a PhD in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London.