François Charbonnet: Catalogue data in Spring Semester 2021

Name Prof. François Charbonnet
FieldArchitecture and Design
Address
Professur f. Architekt. u. Entwurf
ETH Zürich, HIL G 75
Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5
8093 Zürich
SWITZERLAND
E-mailcharbonnet@arch.ethz.ch
URLhttp://www.charbonnet-heiz.arch.ethz.ch
DepartmentArchitecture
RelationshipFull Professor

NumberTitleECTSHoursLecturers
052-0562-00LTerritories of Play - Surveying Architecture Through Gaming (FS) Information
This course (with "00L" at the end) can only be passed once. Please check before signing up!
2 credits2SF. Charbonnet, P. Heiz
AbstractThis seminar will challenge students to take a complementary look onto the built environment through the lenses of Gaming, focusing on specific episodes in order to draw relations between the notions of Play/Game, Society and Architecture.
ObjectiveThe seminar addresses a way of perceiving reality which has become key, with the gaming industry reaching unforeseen volumes in output and sales, as well as gaming theories sitting at the core of general social and financial strategies and policies. Besides offering students steady footing on the makings of an architectural publication, by confronting students with key texts and voices in the past and present of gaming theory and praxis, the seminar will provide them with a complementary tool with which to approach architecture and urbanism.
ContentFrom Game Theory to Dices, touching Go, Hide-and-seek or Sims, a multitude of games and acts of play will serve as standing points for the perception and re-reading of the functioning of societies and the built environments these give rise to. The seminar will be structured into three distinct moments:
An in-depth introduction to the theoretical frame of the seminar through three lectures; by a game designer, by an architectural historian or architect, and by the seminar's tutor. Key theoretical works and authors - Jesse Schell, Johan Huizinga and Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman - will thus be presented and analyzed, hinting at possible bridges to a critical analysis of architecture and the built environment through its decomposition into Mechanics, Aesthetics, Narrative and Technology, the four pillars of game design. A moment of individual work when students will be invited to select a game, dissect it according to the theoretical input previously received, and select a key aspect of it. This key aspect will in turn be used as lenses through which students should analyze and question their reality, a milieu of their own choice: from the spaces and urban situations formulating their daily routine in the city, to their hometown or fetish city. From this analysis, a visual -drawings and images- and written essay presenting and defending their hypothesis of reading of their milieu through gaming should emerge. The writing will be conducted mostly during the seminar's attendance time. And a final moment when students are to produce a ludic publication compiling the classes' essays into an accessible survey.
052-1146-21LArchitectural Design V-IX: Voluptas S1E6 Apollo (F.Charbonnet/P.Heiz) Information Restricted registration - show details
Please register (Link) only after the internal enrolment for the design classes (see Link).

Project grading at semester end is based on the list of enrolments on 2nd April 2021, 24:00 h. This is the ultimate deadline to unsubscribe or enroll for the studio!
14 credits16UF. Charbonnet, P. Heiz
AbstractThe semester "Apollo" aims at designing erratic hyper-contexts generated by hypothetical ruling incentives: as a marker of singularities, it is to become the passionate catalogue raisonné of elemental urban idiosyncrasies.
ObjectiveObjectives:
Research & curation of contemporary concepts, articulation of a discursive argument, visual literacy & storytelling, editing & montage, architectural drafting.

Incentives:
Movies & filmmaking, territorial & urban scale, collectivity, situations & artefacts, socio-political dimension, critical position, contemporary conditions.

Steps:
(1) Analyse a movie, research contemporary concepts, identify potentials, articulate a critical position.
(2) Project an urban scenario on both the artefactual and the territorial scale, focussing on collectiveness and the socio-political aspects of society.
(3) Express a critical position towards a contemporary condition by the means of such a fictive context in both image and plan.
(4) Train rhetorics and argumentation, master drafting skills as well as image montage.
Content"Dionysos / Apollo" is to become a rambling exploration on the lookout for an urban environment beyond reasonable or irrational, good and evil. Considering humankind as embedded in (and dependent on) its geological era, we look upon history’s intertwined layers as torpid raw potential to be fully deployed, appropriated and composed with – joyfully disrespecting historical authenticity. The visionary Hístor seeks, finds novelty in the old, rather than an unfounded assertion of the present with the past. Simultaneously, all thoughts and actions are rooted in essence in the terrestrial now.
The semester APOLLO aims at designing erratic hyper-contexts generated by hypothetical ruling incentives: as a marker of singularities, it is to become the passionate catalogue raisonné of elemental urban idiosyncrasies.

Project:
Students interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in a source movie, before transcribing their subjective reading to a telling but suggestive cinematographic draft (1.80x1.80m). Audacious and unprecedented urban environments are then extrapolated from the narrative as singular metropolitan orthoimages (1.80x1.80m) become the recording canvas of these proliferating storylines.
The complementary drawing and image both crystallize the fictional metropolis’ shared desires and aspirations in an effort to re-write an alternate architectural and territorial fiction and reflect critically on contemporary conditions, overthrowing socio-economic status quo.
Furthermore, students will construct an argumentative arsenal to support their discursive argument, based on an encyclopedic compilation of evocative historical sources.
Prerequisites / NoticeGroup work only.
Mid term crits: open, date will follow.
Costs: CHF 30.--