Workshops

Masterclass – 2016

Elia Zenghelis – Principles of the Modern: Manifestos Recast or The invention of the Public Condenser

Greek architect and teacher Elia Zenghelis returned to the College of Design to lead a second masterclass in January 2016. There was an exhibit of the work in 534 Design on 28 January 2016 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm a more permanent record of the manifestos developed by the students can be found below.

From the brief.

The aim of this workshop, is to articulate your position and response to a set of exemplary paradigms selected from the history of architecture since the so-called ‘revolution’ of the ‘Modern Movement’ – and to illustrate this in the form of an emblematic image that can act as a personal manifesto, that can always be used as a reference, in the course of your continuing engagement with Architecture.

The workshop’s assignment will combine a survey of the origins and evolution of the ‘Modern’ in architecture, its meaning and its bearing, with a re-presentation and transformation of the material studied.

In particular, the workshop will highlight the role that ‘domesticity’ has played in shaping the Modern Movement: if Modernism celebrates the rationalization of the city, what is often overlooked is how it ushered in radically new and expansive forms of domesticity, the effects of which helped transform the entire urban landscape. For that reason, domestic architecture can be seen as a microcosm of the city, in which formal, material and social experimentation can reach new heights, shaping relationships between life and form, bodies and space, sensuality and materiality: an experimentation that can inspire a social and political imaginary, from which to draw an ideological project, both allegorically and literally. You will be asked to illustrate this imaginary in the shape of an “image manifesto”.

While domestic architecture today caters entirely to the domain of private life—something removed from the politics of collective life in the city—we will experiment with domesticity as a site in which to rethink collective life from within: as a Public Condenser. Distinct from the Social Condenser of the Constructivists, the Public Condenser, acquires a supplementary meaning that encompasses the realm of the city, and, of the political.