Project I: Atelier Clancy-Moore

We are running our studio as an encounter and an expansion of the conversations in our practice. As such the tuition will be lead by Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore working in conversation with our assistants and students. Architecture doesn’t happen in isolation, and we prioritise the social construction of each proposition as a key part of the learning experience. We are joined by two incredible assistants - Fanny Noël, director of Cabinet Architects; and Simone Turkewitsch, director of Studio Vacchini Architects who will be a key part of this conversation. 

For this reason we propose for all students to work in pairs. We anticipate there will be differing interpretations and lines of enquiry and so the tuition will work to develop skills and insights into collaborative working. 

NEW ORDER 

We are interested in the lives of buildings and the stories they contain, and our studio is established to allow a deep inhabitation of the work you are proposing, and the social knowledge of being an architect. 

This year in exploring these narratives we will locate our projects in great works of fiction.  Like great buildings, as artefacts these works speak of much more than the mere stories they tell.  By inhabiting these books we will find clients, explore contexts, negotiate climates and the vastly differing rituals and social hierarchies of our world. 

Our brief is deliberately open ended. We have selected books that allow us to engage with and understand diverse places, climates and socio political histories in order that we can develop architectural responses to these. We do this as we agree with Alvaro Siza when he says that architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality. The evolution of both a universal and personal architectural language is rooted in these transformations and translations from one time or culture to another and from the individual author to the collective conscious. 

Today there is a great need for an architects ability to read and translate. Climate change means historic forms of building, vernacular intelligences, gain new value in their translation from one context to another as the weather shifts and our geography is remade.  Alongside this an increased awareness of migration, social justice and cultural appropriation mean that we need to find new ways to live together. For us this starts with an ability to read beyond our habitual understandings and develop a tectonic language that speaks of this new order.

• Quality education
• Gender equality
• Decent work and economic growth
• Sustainable cities and communities
• Climate action

In presence

We do not have a prior agenda for how you draw, make or share your ideas. We encourage all modes - analogue and digital, and will be looking to support students to develop modes of representation that support their architecture and its language. We will be setting final model works to be made in paper (via the zund, or other technology). We work this way in our office, and enjoy its precision, economy and recyclability. We will organise a seminar that will act to support your skills in this area. 

The working method of the studio will explore architectural language and tectonics initially, and build from that to form and type. Your sites will be found in the novels you read from the assigned list of books, so site information will follow once this selection is made. 

Our trip will be to Ireland, and will run from 12th - 16th October. We will talk with architects and visit sites in Dublin and Galway. 

The entire semester is a considered engagement between the student, their work, and their relationship with architecture. We encourage students to take risks, find the aspects of the subject that fascinate them, and speak openly. As such we do not see any single point as an examination, but rather take the semester as a whole as a synthesis. We anticipate that each student will find different ways to articulate and advance their work, and will assess on the basis of their trajectory, reasoning and best work across this period.  

• Ireland (Dublin & Galway), 12.10.23 - 16.10.23 (Optional)