PREVIOUS COURSES

The landscapes and signs of Rotterdam's fossil economy were the subject of a week-long studio. With this course we wanted to make something that is invisible from the official imagery of the city visible again. We wanted to confront the city with its own reality, perhaps with its own impending demise, in order to force a debate. Guided by photographer Ruben Dario Kleimeer and Crimson Historians and Urbanists, the participants have documented and visualized the landscape of fossil energy and economy in the Rotterdam area. The main result of the studio was presented on 7 panels, each showing the work of one of the participants. Seen together, they present a honest portrait of a side of our western European economy that, even if it is being obscured from view, still dominates the way we live and breathe.

In this two-week studio, organized in collaboration with Powerhouse Company, we critically explored and uncovered the role of capital in the way our cities and buildings are being shaped. We looked at the city through the lens of global capital in order to understand how we could use that view in order to shape our vision of a better city. We did this by using the classical economic analyses of the city by researching the roles of Property (land and real estate), Labour (in this case, architecture and design) and Capital (finance). During this studio we focused on Rotterdam, which, due to its partial destruction during World War II, has become a rich testing ground for real estate development experiments over the last 70 years.

The first Film & Architecture Studio 'A City of Thousand Steps' offered a comprehensive way to use cinematic language in architecture and urban design. From research, scriptwriting and storyboarding, to filming and post production. The course focuses on learning and understanding the narrative of filmmaking and its application in the design process, a hands-on studio in which participants learned to structure stories and went through all stages of filmmaking. The studio was a condensed course that offers new ways of researching the built environment and turning this research into well-structured and gripping stories. It is a class where participants with various background were introduced to essential elements of filmmaking and learn how to relate these to architecture and the city. You can see some of the video that were produced during the Studio here

The aim of the Summer School was to get a broad understanding of climate change in the US and Europe. To get a sense of how this radically changes the living conditions – the habitat- on the planet and in particular in landscapes affected by fire, floods, erosion, earthquakes and heat, 9 global test sites were confronted with extreme conditions, proposing new coexistence between landscape and architecture. After three weeks of research in the Fisher Centre NY, students from Syracuse School of Architecture came to Rotterdam from 24 June until 5 July 2019, to design and develop new proposals for habitats, and housing in particular, that can handle these extreme conditions. The outcome of the Summer School was presented trough an exhibition in down-town New York City, presenting  a global perspective on research and design that challenges the possibilities of our human living condition. An immersive installation that depicts a new world map with adapted geographies, hybrid typologies and Anthropocene ecologies that together represent the “Village of Global Warming."

In our 2019 Spring School we looked at the visible and invisible borders in an urban area that straddles the cities of Rotterdam and Schiedam: Oud/Nieuw Mathenesse. The area has two sharply divided zones: the first is a mid-century housing neighbourhood that has for decades been the destination of migrant workers and other immigrants to find homes, start businesses and families and gradually integrate into the Dutch economy and society. The second is a former harbour area which is going to be redeveloped into innovative and creative urban area. After extensive field research into the area, the participants developed strategies to connect both areas to each other and to achieve a more complete and more integrated migration-driven urbanism. To make a city that keeps different globalised economies and communities together, maximising their mutual benefits and the benefits to the local communities and economy. The results of the spring school were presented to a larger audience trough a spectacular exhibition, made by the participants themselves.