In the fall 2013 I designed and taught a graduate studio at the Boston Architectural College, grappling with the idea of openness in architecture. I was fortunate to have a great roster of students with fresh ideas and inquisitive minds. For the studio syllabus and studio work you can refer to the studio’s official website.
— Project by Asli Baran
Studio Brief: Design is a form of colonizing the future: “scripting” and anticipating use-scenarios through spatial and material configurations. Reality, however, always comes as a surprise. The unpredictability of the future and the ever-changing needs and desires of a design’s future inhabitants, is forming a new kind of design conscience: designers give up the control of their designs and leave their works open to modifications and re-appropriations by their future users. This studio critically engages the emerging phenomenon of open architecture, and explores its conceptual, methodological, and practical implications in the ways that we, as designers, relate to the creative process and its outputs. Through design exercises, readings, guest lectures, and a building scale design project we will tackle questions of authorship, participation, user empowerment, copying, and creativity, as well as their relation to computational tools and new communication techniques. By taking the role both of the author/creator and the user/appropriator, students will develop personal strategies and methods to creatively modify architectural spaces, as well as to design architectural settings that facilitate such operations.