The main educational aim of the studio is to help each student develop methods and practices that are resonant with their particular interests and ideas. We are particularly interested in how the media of exploration and persuasion are complementary to the issues under discussion. We see a resonance between the way media and design work together and how the use of materials and processes are able to embody ideas in buildings. This often leads to students developing their own media, or appropriating more conventional methods with their own adaptations, often making their own drawing, making or photographic tools or the digital equivalent.

Your measure.

Measurement is critical to architectural operations – the siting and location of the parts depend on our capacity to register the geometry and nature of the materials we use and how to put them together. We do not dispute the importance of measurement, but observe the cultural shift in the political agency of the measure and the consequence this has had on architectural values. In most realms within the politician’s reach there has been an increasing tendency to measure what people do, a means of control and of passing on responsibility. As a consequence we live in a culture where the aspects of life that are valued are not so much those that matter but those that can be explicitly measured.

Many of the things that we value – many of the attributes of architecture that elevate one project above another – defy numerical appropriation, yet despite this, register strongly in our experience. The reductive nature of this measuring has a numbing and normalising effect on architectural production. This year we would like to value a broader and richer vein of values and to propose architecture that enjoys the immeasurable.

Each student will develop their own register of aspects of cultural and spatial occupation they value but are beyond conventional measure – something or some practice they can take to the site of their architectural proposal and understand the place through this register on their own terms. We are emboldened in our hopes that this is possible through work such as Duchamp’s measure of chance, the Standard Stoppages, as well as a range of figurative devices used by cultures to understand territories and spatial systems (for example, Polynesian Stick Maps, Inuit coastal maps or Inca Quipu). There are many examples of religions projecting intangible and immeasurable ideas on a territory. So we suspect that it is well within the grasp of a masters student to devise ways to register a place (or site) on the basis of their own values, or to project those values onto a place.

We will learn from conventional measures, both abstract and figurative, how ideas of measurement gain authority so that our measures are made to count in a highly calibrated world.

These measures will have a practical role on site and act as a conceptual touchstone in the studio while developing a consequent architecture.

We will start with an introductory project to help each student establish the terms of their measure.

To nourish this quest we will travel to Belgium with its rich history of academic institutions and collections of embodied knowledge to understand how others have charged artefacts with ideas. We will touch examples of architecture where the almost erogenous sensuality defies quantification, the sort of knowledge that is available only through experiencing a place. We will visit surrealist bars that propose other sets of values on a conventional institution. And so on.

We will take particular interest in instruments where an agency is discovered beyond the original purpose.