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MBIArch Notes: Détournements

Architectural Design

The MBIArch short design studios are all beginning this week, with three different approaches to architectural design and thinking led by Visiting Professors Cecilia Puga, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Philippe Rahm. The short studios are intended as concentrated academic exercises that will be developed over the course of the next four weeks; the following semester, students will enroll in one of the three proposed core design studios, which also pertain to the Architectural Design portion of the MBIArch curriculum, with different academic targets as they are undertaken throughout the Spring term.

Chilean architect Cecilia Puga’s studio, titled 'Détournements', prompts students to think of an architectural place and event related to possible tourism activities/performances. The studio seeks to revisit the traces of two abandoned sites in the arid northern coast of Chile; aiming to connect existing abandoned industrial docks with a grouping of ruins at the Chungungo Settlement, with the intention of building up a possible architectural scenario for recreational purposes. With the aim of reusing both the physical and cultural remains, students will construct a new imagery for the site, and develop strategies and proposed interventions for a completely new programmatic and material identity “through acts of interpretation, détournement and juxtaposition” as described by Puga.

The studio, which is supported by Assistant Professor Olga Felip, has been divided into three sequential phases: Collecting Methodology, Organization in the Field and Consequences. The phases, organized according to Robert Williams’ text ‘Disjecta Reliquiae: the Tate Thames Dig’, reflect the concepts of first recording every available detail, to then be able to process that information into a meaningful image which will then lead to the final master plan and proposal.

As Puga explains, “We will detail an ideology and some expectations, through the creation of a new physical, material and constructive reality which is in turn formulated from the circumstances and relationships between the objects that were found and those that were juxtaposed.”

*Photo by Timothy Brennan

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