MIAW 2016: Off Campus, the Future Leonardo Archipelago

The exhibition disseminates the research results coming forth from a 11 days design-research workshop (25 Ferbuary 2016-6 March 2016) with an international group of students at Politecnico di Milano. On a site adjacent to the campus of Politecnico di Milano, the following topics have been thoroughly investigated by design: Tactic 1: The Perspective Hinge The basic tactic of this workshop starts from a critical reflection on the operational methods in the conception of architecture. Through an intensive process of making, this MIAW 2016 Workshop explores new avenues that attempt to break through habitual ways of seeing the conception of architecture as it aims for the generation of new space, and more specifically how this happens through the intensive dialectics between this space and its architectural detail. Alberto Pérez-Gòmez and Louise Pelletier (Pérez-Gòmez and Pelletier 1997) elaborate on the impact of tools of representation on the conceptual development of architectural space and form. "Writing from inside the discipline of architecture, rather than from the more common extrapolations from the history of painting and philosophy, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier focus on the implications of the tool of perspective (and the hegemony of vision) for architectural representation. Their primary thesis is that tools of representation have a direct influence on the conceptual development of projects and generation of forms, and that there are alternatives to the reductive working methods of most contemporary practice ... The authors' ultimate aim is to probe the possibilities of the constructed world-that is, architecture-as a poetic translation, rather than prosaic transcription, of its representations" (outtake from the synopsis of the book, provided by the publisher). Rather than starting from tested 'methods' widely applied in architecture, that start from the level of urban design with its extensive surveys of cities through the application of the plan (or the map), this workshop experimentally starts from the intimate architectural fragment that is represented as a vertical section. From there, the plan is seen as the derivative of the section, and not the other way round. This is the moment where/when the perspective hinge is at work, the moment when two dimensional survey erects into the three dimensional representation of the imagined space and its beloved material detail. This representation works through the vertical depth of the archit