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FUNDAMENTALS: ARCHITECTURE THROUGH THE BODY
Architecture begins with the body. In Fundamentals Studio, we explore architecture as a spatial, material, and embodied practice. The course introduces first-year students to architectural thinking through a series of experimental briefs that unfold from the scale of the body toward inhabitable spatial propositions. The aim is not to define architecture, but to discover it through process - through gesture, structure, sensation, and transformation. Students engage fundamental concepts - scale, proportion, movement, structure, form, atmosphere, and inhabitation - as interrelated tools for spatial exploration. The studio is conceived as a laboratory for architectural discovery, where the body becomes both the medium and measure of design. Each brief is constructed as a pedagogical experiment, introducing key design methods: 1:1 analysis, analog drawing, model-making, performative actions, and material testing. The process is iterative, tactile, and grounded in affordance, perception, and transformation. Through acts of making and reflection, students begin to understand architecture as a relational, processual, and performative discipline.
Context of Investigation
The pedagogical ethos is rooted in two principles: thinking through the hand and thinking through the body. These guide a process that is both intuitive and rigorous, sensorial and spatial. By engaging with performative methods, and analog tools, students develop an embodied understanding of space, beyond visual representation. The studio takes inspiration from historic experimental schools like the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas, where material exploration, performative inquiry, and artistic process framed the foundations of design education. Here, architecture is understood as a relational and sensorial practice - deeply intertwined with movement, atmosphere, light, and matter. Thinking through the body and through the hand becomes the method by which students begin to sense, imagine, and articulate space, developing spatial awareness and material intelligence.
Studio Agenda and Methodology
The studio is structured through a sequence of briefs that operate as iterative and generative experiments, introducing new spatial concepts, methods, and representational tools, while building on prior investigations. Emphasizing a hands-on approach, the process is rooted in drawing, model-making and bodily experimentation. The agenda unfolds through a careful interplay of artistic, technical, and conceptual exploration, where making becomes a way of thinking. Learning emerges through analysis, transformation, abstraction, layering, and construction. The body serves as the point of departure: a scale, a reference, a sensing instrument, and a catalyst for design. Together, these methods lay the foundation for a reflective and situated architectural practice.
Teaching team: Carla Collevecchio (course responsible), Ali Onat Turker, Stefan Raam, Oskar Häggström Germann.
Latest update: 2025-09-02