architektonima
Space-making through architecture, signals and weaving.
by Maya Christodoulaki.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
By inhabiting the unswept floor of Hadrian’s Villa in Rome, we establish a way of thinking that learns through accumulation, leftovers, and what resists cleaning up. At once intimate and excessive, the image frames domestic comfort as abundance, disorder, and residue.
Among bones, shells, peels, and nuts, this figure complements the idea of learning as home, introduced by Vitruvius in his reflections on domestic architecture. For Vitruvius, the fulcrum of architecture lies in the abundance of learning: a capacity that transcends geography, social ties, and the instability of fortune (fortuna), granting the learned individual a form of global citizenship.
Tasked with the extreme allowances produced by the amplitude of computational and built Bestand, the seminar turns toward the curious nature of foundations. We look at the floor and resist the desire to clean the unswept. Rather, we negotiate its principality; rather, we think in terms of affordances. How might we observe and speculate, bridge noise with measure, see perspective through the oblique, compute the primary through the provisional?
Drawing on Michel Serres’ Foundations trilogy—Rome,Statues, Geometry—the course moves between human and machine, tracing relations within what is already present. Through the writings of Vitruvius, Michel Serres, Massimo Scollari, Erwin Panofsky, Pierre Hadot, Manfredo Tafuri, Ernst Cassirer, and Raymond Ruyer, the seminar sways between Rome and Fortune to think the spatial through the soft.