The seminar is the first part of a three part course that extends into the summer semester with a second seminar and concludes in an on-site summer workshop. Participation in all segments of the course is encouraged but not mandatory.

The course focuses on the interior as a conceptual space formed by lived experiences. The interior should be understood as provisional, either because our time in it is limited or because it is in constant flux with an opposing position, an exterior. We will look at the interior as an intersection between physical, mental, and digital modes of being. Close attention to boundaries, thresholds, and interstices will help us articulate our visions for the interior.

The first semester focuses on research, theory, and schematic/iterative atmospheric ideas (see comments section below for more info). The second semester demands that the group select a single motivation to be articulated in detail. Here the group confronts the realities of budget, planning, and communication. The summer workshop sees the implementation of the work itself.

The course is as much about understanding and creating atmospheres and experiences through specific effects, as it is about finding inventive strategies for collective endeavors. The students, as a group, are simultaneously makers, actors, critics, and authors.

Moreover, the students will be charged with creating a spatial intervention that will be up and in place for a year in a space that is open to the street and caters to a particular informality of urban life. This gives the students a unique opportunity not only to test their ideas as a resolution of a collective design process but also as an actual public artifact in constant interaction with a transient body of people that populate the space or interface with its presence from the street.

IMPORTANT: This course is co-taught! To register fully for the course (full credits) please register to the twin course under same title (S04654)!!

Examination for this course is firmly based on 1) attendance and 2) participation in group work. The course centers around a collective project, thus the above two requirements are a must.

Formal Registration (for validation, marking, and credits) is on a first come first serve basis (or to pre-diploma students with credit requirements).

The course is open to students from other departments!

Further notes of the Winter Semester (Part 1) component of the course:

The first seminar deals with the notion that our perception of space is as much influenced by material properties as it is by immaterial phenomena directly linked to our physical understanding of the world.

The first seminar asks: can we find ways to analyze, represent, and ultimately reproduce the immaterial as a way to come to a fuller understanding of the production of space?

We begin with an introductory lecture where we present key concepts (atmosphere, immateriality, liminality, ambiguity, experience) and techniques (notation, performance), and begin to familiarize the students with a multidisciplinary body of work.

The lecture is followed by an atmospheric tour through Vienna over the course of a day. The tour consists of a range of inside places that help the studio begin to read the city using modes of inquiry presented in the lecture. The tour provides the opportunity to interface with the city in unusual and unexpected ways.

After the city tour the students are divided into groups. As a kick-off exercise, each group is assigned one of the stations from the tour and is asked to invent a notational system describing the immaterial qualities of the particular site. The groups will develop novel techniques to represent values such as sound, light, texture, movement, smell, and temperature, but also subjective qualities particular to their experiences. The students present (or perform) the notational systems to each other.

After the kick-off notational exercise, the students begin work on an atlas of atmospheric concepts. In an attempt to free ourselves from a material imperative, we use a scheme of emotive and relational values. Instead of a site or a function or a form, each group will be assigned a short story. Alongside the story, the students will be assigned an actual site in Vienna where they will eventually realize their installation. If the city tour was an attempt at finding ways to reveal and represent the immaterial, the spatial reading of the story works as a scaffold to help materialize the invisible world of social and subjective experience. The narrative atmospheres will add up to a catalog of possibilities that will carry over into the second phase.

Weekly feedback sessions and off campus guest lectures structure the bulk of the seminar meetings.

The semester ends with a presentation and pitch. The students decide on a single strategy to follow into a planning phase.