Architectural Ethnography: Case Study House W.
Dozentin: Oxana Gourinovitch
Join us for an architectural ethnographic journey to the House W. near Potsdam. It’s main building was erected after WW2 by a stone mason who fled Berlin, and comprises the salvaged fragments of the ruined Berlin museums, governmental buildings of the Reich, and the discarded memorials from the neighbouring cemetery. For the last 60 years, it became the residence of an East-German ceramic artist — a multiple refugee himself, and, for more than a decade, a pariah of the GDR artist scene — who transformed it along his oscillating living circumstances.
The House W.’s has been informed by destruction, displacement, social exclusion, as well as personal resourcefulness and resilience, but also by available technologies, building regulations, by political coercion and permissiveness. Personal and material detritus became major resources for the synthesis of this fascinating built environment.
Our goal is to document the living environments of the House W., paying due attention to its entanglement with historical, political and social complexities, as well as biographic peripeties of its residents.
The participants are expected to attempt a graphic recording of the House W., which would do justice to the “thingly” nature of its buildings. To put it in the words of Latour and Yaneva, we are looking for an equivalent of Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic gun* — to be tested on the House W.
For those ends, the participants are encouraged to apply the methods of “architectural ethnography” — and are invited to reflect upon its widely varying interpretations and fairly blurred boundaries.
Good drawing and graphic skills will be beneficial, but are not a requirement.
**Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “«Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An ANT’s View of Architecture”, Ardeth, 1 | 2017, 103-111.
FG Städtebauliche Denkmalpflege und urbanes Kulturerbe: Architectural Ethnography: Case Study House W.
36361600 FG Städtebauliche Denkmalpflege und urbanes Kulturerbe, Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung (ISR)
Do. 20.04 - 20.07.23, wöchentlich, 14:00 - 16:00
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