CONTEXT 2: From Room to Universe and Back Again

Natasha Sandmeier

Diploma 9 will continue its interrogation of context while blurring the line between fantasy and fiction as we design worlds that challenge the conventional form of an architectural project – one that must reconnect with the larger cultural context. As such, our discourse will hover between the 1970s architectural theory of contextualism and the contemporary use of fiction in order to test the extreme form of an idea.

In 2010/11, our first year of the Context series, we brought the wunderkammer into the unit as a conceptual and historical precedent. This year we again integrate the room as a design project, but this time in collaboration with the larger year project – using them to expand and shape our constructed contextual relationships. The Room of Wonder will operate in its historical form as a microcosm of a more expansive world, offering the viewer – and more importantly the designer – the ability to reinterpret the large (your project) by reconfiguring the small (your portfolio/room). A room tells a story through its collection, display and arrangement of objects, and is the mediator between our imagination and our architecture. Borrowing heavily from Duchamp’s Box in a Valise, we will reinvent what it means to make a portfolio/mini-collection/portable room.

We will also beg, borrow, steal, rewrite, resituate and redesign important architectural rooms and worlds; from the modernist high ground of Mies’ own reshaping of Americana and Koolhaas’ re-origination of Manhattan with Delirious New York, to the Eameses’ media saturation of the house that describes a new form of space, image and lifestyle. As we jump between the scales and context of our rooms and the worlds beyond, we will embody these designers’ absolute capacity for singular and persuasive vision – all of them designed universes, not just projects.

Each student will begin the year by writing a personal manifesto whose expression will frame the year ahead and set up the context (artefacts, events, materials, histories and spaces) of the proposal. In Terms 1 & 2 we will collaborate with the graduate History & Critical Thinking programme through a series of seminars on architecture and context.

Unit Staff

Natasha Sandmeier is an architect and partner of Big Picture Studio. She was Project Architect for the Seattle Public Library while at OMA. She has been Unit Master of Diploma 9 since 2007, and was Intermediate 2 Unit Master from 2001–06. She also directs the AA Summer School.