Pleasure

Dwelling on Patterns

Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein

Dwelling. What does it mean to dwell in space? Do we dwell only where we live? Do we feel at home where we dwell? Can we dwell in movement? To think about dwelling, we will continue using a methodology familiar to our Chair, one of inhabitation, one of spending time in the spaces we are curious about. We will continue to visit, build, and draw some of Zurich’s protagonists of dwelling culture. Through visiting them together, we become users, conceiving of the spaces through the eyes of an inhabitant. We acquire an attitude close to that of any other person, experiencing the house, the domestic order and the life it contains.

Patterns. We will also continue to work in the company of a book. Books make us notice things that often pass unseen. They bring consolation. They offer support. This semester we will turn to A Pattern Language, an iconic 1977 book by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. In it, they define architecture and communities as language, composed of patterns. Their method, boiled down, was participatory, emotional and adaptive, ending up somewhere between science and religion. We recognise that patterns change according to times, conditions, behaviors. We will critically study many of the 253 patterns the book defines, projecting and testing them to ultimately re-write them and come to terms with their usefulness in our times and context.

Pleasure. Defined as a feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment, our interest lies in consciously approaching study as something that can produce this feeling. Pleasure is often regarded as suspicious in an academic context. Together with you, we want to explore its potential as an active posture, we want to create a studio as a repository of pleasure.

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