win(e)environment / ARC 642 Design Studio @ OSU 2008

Forms are not bounded by their physical limits. Forms emanate and model space.

Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture

Modern Architecture consumes energy like no architecture before it, and one of its worst faults is that it consumes it so negligently. The negligence lies not only in its frequent wastefulness, but also, and this is harder to forgive, in its failure to exploit the architectural possibilities to anywhere near full.

Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters: A personal View of Modern Architecture

The aim [of architecture] is to act in advance of form, at a subformal level, by modifying the very information that gives rise to form, to behavior, to thought.

Philippe Rahm, Hormonorium: Swiss Pavilion, 8th Biennale of Architecture, Venice

Studio Thesis - This studio will reconsider Reyner Banham's thesis on the "controlled environment" in order to document, comprehend and utilize climatic conditions as a space generating device. In The Architecture of the Well- Tempered Environment (1969), Banham articulated his view of "environmental power" distinct from a moralist ecological argumentation; rather, he presented the "well tempered environment" as a novel way to conceptualize space though immaterial elements - sound, light, electricity and moving images - and through numeric calculations: space as information. The scope of this studio is to revisit Banham's ideas on the ecologies of architecture in conjunction with recent experiments by Philippe Rahm on the (re-) creation of environments. Thus, the thesis of this studio postulates an active architecture of micro-climatic environments. We will not work towards "eco-activism" or earnest sustainable prototypes, but for an imbedded intelligence in buildings and the computation of their micro- environments in relationship to program. Environments are understood twofold: As the immediate spatial ecologies of bodies, architecture and territories, as well as projected spaces of events in the transcendent meaning of the word. Subverting a techno-phenomenological approach traced earlier by Siegfried Giedion -modern chronist par excellence - environment will analyzed as a medium of emergency. In analogy to Robert Slutzky's and Collin Rowe's concept of "literal and phenomenological transparency" we will postulate an architecture of literal and phenomenological environments and test it with digital design tools.

Program - Win(e)nvironment Programmatically, we will apply Banham's "controlled well-tempered" environment in the large scale of an urban intervention for a wine hotel and facility in Geneva Switzerland. On the micro-ecological level the disappearance of physical boundaries between space and organism, as revealed by biology and the neurosciences, will establish a continuity between the living and the non-living, the opening up to the invisible, to electromagnetic and biological determinations (Rahm). Visitors will experience wine and participate in wine production. The program will accommodate a wine hotel, a vineyard, facilities for wine production and wine storage. Different programmatic requirements - for instance the temperature and percentage of light, required to preserve wine - will function as generative parameters for the construction of microclimates and "well- tempered environments" that will actively inform the design process. Wine and grapes may function as litmus tests and indicators of microclimaticchanges. In the framework of the studio, we will consider how microclimates are crated within larger interventions in between the scale of architecture, landscape and urbanism.

Site – Geneva Geneva, Switzerland [GPS coordinates: N46* 12' 34.55'' E6*09' 00.07''] offers a rich climatic, ecological, and urbanistic background for the implementation of the aforementioned thesis. The site is a former tramway depot located at the confluence of the Rhone and Arve rivers.