Construction Workshop - BSA/Intro

Along with the quote from Sergison Bates about the value of phenomenological learning another quote that was really important to our initial ideas for how the workshop could be run was a quote from Venturi and Scott Brown’s “Learning From Las Vagas”

“Pop Artists used unusual juxtapositions of everyday objects in tense and vivid plays between old and new associations to flout the everyday interdependence of context and meaning, giving us a new interpretation of twentieth century cultural artifacts. The familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power.”

The cultural artifact we identified was the pub, something that everyone is familiar with and has many unwritten rules built into its fabric which tell us how to behave. The first stage of the workshop was set up as a week long investigation into the public house typology. The idea of the investigation was so that what the workshop would ultimately produce would be more than the table that a bar essentially is. We hoped we would be able to subvert the generic measurements we discovered so that people might leave the show with a heightened realisation of how the spaces and furniture within the public house effects their behaviour.

Thus the workshops name became THE PUB IN THE HUB. These are the posters we produced to try and excite people to join the workshop and to inform them of the schedule.

The architectural precedent we discussed with the students for taking the familiar and putting it slightly out of balance was the OMA pavilion for the Milan Triennial in 1985. The project reassembled the pieces that remained of Mies’ original Barcelona Pavilion from all over Europe and reconstructed them within the site parameters. With the site being curved this instantly put the familiar lines of Mies’ masterpiece into a totally unfamiliar yet still highly recognisable new configuration. The visitor was not only able to interrogate what was infront of them but also had to reinterpret everything they thought they knew about the original which was and wasn’t infront of them. As well as all this theoretical whiff-whaff the project was just cool from what photos I have seen, with large solid state TV’s scattered round the floor and all sorts of interesting stuff.