Transformation

Teaching Programme 1

Teaching programme 1: Transformation offers study environments that harness the school’s vision of Engaging Through Architecture and its three focus areas: transformation, habitation, and sustainability at both Bachelor’s and Master’s level. The programme has a specific focus on transformation.

The programme spans the scales of our discipline from landscape and urban design over building design to smaller additions to the built environment. Under the common headline transformation, we work with both highly valued historical structures and the architecture of the more recent past.

When architects deal with transformation, they take their starting point in what is already there: landscapes, cities, neighbourhoods and buildings. Consequently, we find it of great importance that students develop the ability to investigate the existing world: to observe, analyse and identify qualities – and to reproduce such qualities in different kinds of representations. In teaching programme 1, architectural projects are developed based on an informed assessment of what is already there.

The specific unit or studio has its own way of investigating the existing: mapping, valuation, interpretation and palimpsest are terms that describe some of the approaches of the programme. We do things differently, but we share a common goal: to qualify new architectural proposals by taking a critical and deliberate position on the already existing.

In the Bachelor units, students are introduced to different analytical approaches, whereas the Master studios offer specialisation within different professional fields of architecture.