Corporate Domain

Eugene Han

Diploma Unit 8 will continue its research into the role of the corporation as an integral and vital element in the development of the contemporary territorial condition with which architecture must now contend.

The unit’s core investigation within the Corporate Domain will utilise reductive elements in architecture as a means to understand the prevalent yet seemingly contradictory tendency for the development of an excessively individualised architecture for an ever-generic understanding of the corporation and the city.

Corporate Complex
Students will be required to develop speculative proposals for a large-scale corporate complex as the basis for researching and further developing their understanding of the evolving roles of contemporary corporations in relation to their urban contexts. In keeping with the unit’s adoption of form as derived from organisational logic, the design of the contemporary corporate complex must consider the dynamic nature of economies in the city. More importantly, the proposal must be able to address underlying static constructions that allow for the perceptible change of the built environment. Central to the methodology of the unit is the attempt to understand the process of the architectural ‘object’ from a computational definition. Rather than commence proposals on any given size-dependent scale, such an object-oriented approach necessitates a simultaneous and non-scalar implementation of a priori architectural attributes.

Corporate Territory
The unit will collectively study seminal works in mid-twentieth-century Europe and the US as well as contemporary evolutions. Though current trends in expansion and global territorialisation are immediately understandable, our projects demand a deeper understanding of the layered organisations that must be developed for such intricate frameworks to exist, and their various repercussions for architecture. In order to demonstrate their thesis, students will select their own site and corporation for the development of their yearlong project. The resultant proposals will demonstrate the success (and failures) of their established architectural elements as tested for a large-scale corporate complex within a stated context.

The value of projects will be based on both the credibility such speculations can produce and, more importantly, on the fractional but precise elucidation of the role of the contemporary corporation within the city.

Unit Staff

Eugene Han runs AVA-Studio, developing systems in industrial design, architecture and computation. He is the Head of Media Studies at the AA.