Studio Brief & Information

The Good Neighbour and its Shadow

SHADOWS
According to Barthes – the role of the phantom, of shadows, is to make explicit and implicit modes of experience. A workshop in Venice is a very particular mode of experience. This studio will begin by harvesting Venetian shadows.

Explicit implies dutifully copying – homo faber – the handwork of designing.
Implicit implies atmosphere/imagery – homo ludens – the interstices of notation – THE NOTEBOOK

All studio members must arrive with a NOTEBOOK – robust paper and hardback – the materiality of a notebook stands for thought, history, experience.
A notebook = a provisionary receptacle of inspired randomness.

What we will be collecting/recording is Venetian shadows  – a technique to avoid the romantic delirium everybody falls into while gliding around Venice on a Vaporetto (or should one say – as Cusanus – that it is Venice that glides past) a feist for the eyes and the imagination.
In Venice we are all fully programmed – with our multiple Calvino Cities – with our William Morris dreams of cities without cars – with our blue guides and with a vague inheritance of stone from that enemy of the Renaissance, John Ruskin.

FIELDWORK
As our site is at the edge of Venice, regular (preferably daily) expeditions across the city will offer an emporium of shadows to abstract, note and record. The notation of these personal souvenirs will then become the toolbox for architectural projection.
Fieldwork activates a sense of failure… a foreboding that recording is always inadequate – but we must remember that it has the potential of a shadow, something invisible and auratic that makes the thing depicted worth depicting.

The question will arise whether an architecture can be projected up from its shadow – causality reversed. Are we in fact already designing, can function follow form?

To give our emerging architecture a character we will provisionally call it – THE GOOD NEIGHBOUR – it will be up to individual projects to fill this out with use scenarios (individual, multiple occupancy, institutional).

Field Trips

Villa Foscari (designed by Andrea Palladio) situated on the Italian mainland between Venice and Padua

• A return motorboat trip from Venice, along the Brenta canal, to the Villa Foscari (La Malcontenta) designed by Andrea Palladio. inc. a tour of the building.

Internships

Are internships at Bolles+Wilson available to students of Bolles+Wilson Studio?
Yes. Internship places are available

Location Available:
Münster, Germany

Details:
Students accepted into the Bolles+Wilson Studio at Venice Studio are eligible for selection to undertake an internship at Bolles+Wilson. Selection of candidates is at the sole discretion of the studio director and Bolles+Wilson. Places are not guaranteed.
Please contact us at Venice Studio using the form below should you have further questions.

BOLLES+WILSON

BOLLES+WILSON are internationally known for a consistently high architectural quality in a wide range of projects, each an individual solution developed with careful consideration to the cultural and the urbanistic context, which it must enhance.

The program, whether cultural, residential, office, retail/entertainment, public use, or administrational is always the generator of the building form. Our philosophy is to ennoble the practical necessities and the purpose a building must serve through creative invention. Ultimately the technical, the programmatic as well as issues of sustainability must be simply and elegantly synthesised as architecture and as spaces with a distinctive and unique character.

BOLLES+WILSON are based in Germany but operate internationally with projects in Albania, Australia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.

Suzuki House
Tokyo, Japan

© Ryuji Mijamoto