Plaza of Curiosities

Second Year Undergraduate Design Studio
ioud - Institute of Urban Design
University of Innsbruck
2020

Studio Description

The Studio investigated cabinets of curiosities and the method of collecting. The students were asked to design a Mixed-Use Intersection Plaza as an extension of Seoul Forest Park in order to bridge levels of privacy within programs whilemaintaining a strong relationship with the urban surrounding.

Through the various tasks students were able to construct and imagine new urban applications while emphasizing on the architecturalproduction of collections each student came up with. This exercise of
collecting curiosities brought forth discussions on shape and form as well as site and built form in hopes of forming a detrimental urban relationship with
architecture.

Project Overview

The work throughout the semester was based on composition of elements drawn from the each individual collection of curiosities. The vehicle for exploring this was the preliminary research on junctions and layers of movement throughout the city. The studio focused on the fundamental differences in negative and positive spaces, orientation, resolution, and how these differences have an impact on the organization of mixed use building complexes.

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“The architecture was generated by the curatorial impulse, and the continual presence of that impulse opens the house to temporality and permits it to be reinstalled with every newcontemporary imaginary. Soane was a pack rat-he was not just a collector but a compulsive, with excessive multiples in each category of his collection. The collection is not precisely encyclopedic but repetitive. It did not produce a comprehensive assemblage of unique objects
within a class-every different kind of capital, for example.”

Sylvia Lavin (2003)
The Temporary Contemporary