International Student Workshop
Overview
The international student workshop "The spirit of material, builging sustainability", brings together students from three architecture/design schools in Israel, Cyprus, and Greece to address the question how materials from one building –historic or industrial– can be reused for new uses. When a building is renovated or restored for new uses and energy upgrade, or is demolished for urban renewal, how its materials and building parts can serve as the raw material for new designs?
The workshop will introduce the "Talking-Building" game as a methodology for analysing the needs and potentials of buildings, developed in the EU Horizon program SINCERE. For example, we will explore provocative questions posed by architect Louis I. Kahn, such as "What does a brick want to be?", and will expand on the concept of how a material can become the source of inspiration for new design and new structures.
> Check the introductory presentation by P. Antoniadis and I. Apostol
Participation
Due to the situation in the Middle East, the workshop will take place online with a focus on the #TalkingBuildings methodology. More details will be provided during the first session, on Monday, March 23rd.
Useful material from Xanthi workshop
> The generic TalkingBuildings challenge
> Xanthi workshop catalogue
> Introduction to the TalkingBuildings Game (including student video inputs)
> Watch the Xanthi workshop summary video by Gil Lupo
The Talking-Building game
The main assumption behind the SINCERE's Building-Stories platform and the Talking-Building game is that the process of giving a voice to buildings can reveal important aspects of their condition and potential future. It produces also very playful and inspiring outcomes that can attract attention and stimulate creative engagement.
The Building-Stories platform will be soon launched and it will collect stories from cultural heritage buildings across Europe, documented in simple web blog sites maintained by local actors. Every post will correspond to a "speech act" by the building and we believe that it is best if these speech acts are produced by groups of people in a participatory setting.
This is the role of the TalkingBuildings game, which invites participants to 1) Observe carefully a building through all their senses, 2) Choose a specific part of this building, and 3) Narrate a story through its own perspective.
We will experiment with different observation prompts, framing scales, and storytelling mediums, and discover all together what the building and its small or big parts have to say about the past, the present, and the future.
