Tutors: Dusan Decermic and Elantha Evans

DS11 has been conceived as a supportive, self-reflexive, and critical framework for the development of a series of urban programmes identified with individual cities and their geographic, socio-economic and political situations. Shifting between design ambitions at a large geographical or urban scales and their implications at architectural inhabited scales, we explore the relationship between conceived space, representations, material, making and inhabitation. The studio notes a distinction between MArch1 and MArch2, enjoying the relationship between studio and other modules. We are recruiting a crew of inquisitive young architects with a love for city life (and maps!), honesty, bravery, a belief in architecture as key to society, and a keen sense of adventure. The studio will flourish if we assemble a multitude of talents, skills and interests.

The Intrinsic | Extrinsic City

Return of the Binary 

2018-2019 Cordoba

The city of lost souls

Cordoba in Andalucía, Spain, is the first city in our new six-year plan; the first city of Europe, capital of the Islamic Emirate, edge of the land of the Vandals and at the fore-front of the Moorish surge. This year, DS11 has re-launched with an ambitious new six-year plan; moving our fascinations and curiosities outwards to examine Europe’s extreme edges and their own forgotten (ex)centricities and stories. Alternating each year from South to North, we will ‘stitch’ these extreme territories together from West to East, working around the void of Europe left behind. Each two-year sequence will bring together in sharp contrast a pair of cities lying loosely along similar longitude, but always on opposing latitudes. Extreme geography results not only in the extremes of weather, but also in demographic movement and economies, in resources, in integration and separation, in purity and dilution; do mythologies hold true? What does the future hold for these liminal territories and how can we respond and enjoy the ‘plenty’ and warmth of the ‘Levant’ versus the cold and ‘scarcity’ of the North?

Semester ONE starts with a series of creative, high-tempo, short projects; producing a substantial body of work to open-up possibilities, develop common understandings and set the studio’s working ethos for the year ahead.

0-0 figure: ground | A flawed subject | Cast-written-drawn | Inhabited-space

0-1 figure: ground | Rubic’s Fields | Replication-liberation | Virtual-space

1-0 court: yard | Knackers Yard | Photogrammetry-forensic poetry | Non/found-space

1-1 court: yard | The Court | Re-inventing typologies | Specific-space

Semester TWO

MArch2      Catalogue to thesis: treatise or manifesto? Architectural embodiment.

MArch1      Court for Cordoba: a new hybrid, equine or divine? Programme, place, proposition.

Territorial investigations at a city scale are year-long, with focused studies from afar in Semester One and then up close in the second, kicking off Semester Two with a week-long field trip to Andalucía and finalization of thesis briefs and site selections in Cordoba. Parallel technical studies and thorough precedent research will link the Studio’s endeavour with both Technical Studies and Strategic Report agendas; with guided and focused design development work through the pursuit of studio-centric research into some specialist areas, linking experiential intention with careful consideration of material, light, construction and ‘sustainability’.

DS11 is a studio with a long track record in examining and researching the European City, with a focus on the role of public buildings, the urban condition, and space caught in the flux of the wider European Union project, it’s politics and economy. The territories and themes explored from 2008 to 2017 were rooted in the core of Mittel Europa; our methodology and projects have been described, celebrated and recently published in our ‘studio as book’, ‘The Intrinsic and Extrinsic City’.

REYKJAVIK 2019-20 coming soon…