AA 09/10 – Diploma 14 – Thesis – UPDATED

FIELD UNIVERSITY

5th Year Thesis Project

The University of Nalanda

The University of Berlin

MIT Stata Building

The Post-Fordist University : The University in Ruins

The university as an institution has reached a critical point where the very founding principles of research and learning has put the university in a position where its been exposed to a multiplicity of external factors that threatens its autonomy: internal bureaucratisation, government and corporate control, academic subjugation to private interests and rise in student populations. The architectural fabric no longer represents the extent to which the traditional Humboldtian concepts of academic freedom, academic self-governing, unity of teaching and researching, are to be representative within the campus, but instead has become a pastiche of iconicities, segregation of faculties, disarticulated growth and inconsistency with the fulfilment of research and its relationship with private interests.

The City Without Architecture; the Campus of Indeterminacy

No stop city took the supermarket as the representation of the state of the metropolis. The homogenic interior takes the supermarket organizational premise of infinite dimensions and artificial environment as the final relationship between the citizen and its increasingly technologically interconnected capitalist framework. A city without qualities for a man (finally) without qualities – that is, without compromise – freed society (freed even from architecture).p.71

This project examines a radical alternative in campus organisation that avoids hierarchy, disaggregation, functional zoning, and in turns favours a condition of homogeneity within the operational framework of a university by means of an indoor campus. Most importantly, this campus looks at contemporary learning and notions of the university as means to reconcile with its founding ideals, as well as anticipating an alternative to a condition where student and living are compressed indistinguishably. This project takes the notion of the field as a literal organization that favours indeterminacy in space and choreographs discrete elements to preserve its organizational integrity, while condensing specific moments throughout the field that favours specific social and academic exchange.

Traditional European campus layout distributes dormitory, lecture and faculty facilities within predefined circulation and proximity criteria that consider a fixed moment in its development and seldom acknowledge an eventual expansion throughout the university’s lifespan. Strategies of iconic buildings and extension towards farmlands or methods to “engage” the city they reside with. These methods systematically avoid addressing the potential the university architectural fabric itself has to reinvent the campus organization and how it contributes to contemporary learning. Bequeathing traditional form sets the campus into a position of passiveness whether it comes from a historically rich setup or entirely new project.

Louis Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India, applies the notion of the monastery as an alternative strategy to layout the campus, where “The unity of the teaching building, dormitories and teacher’s houses – each its own nature, yet each near the other”[1], posits a re-examination of the organization between campus buildings. More importantly for Kahn, the interrelationship and navigation in between determined objects was an important element that, by using light and wind as means to install moments of conversation between the students and exacerbate the encounters faculty members will have in between lectures would contribute to the learning experience. Kahn’s Erdman Hall Dormitory Bryn Mawr College is a specific example where within a student living quarter, interaction and extension of the indeterminate areas to instil interaction is a driving element in the plan configuration.

Kahn’s indeterminate foci instil a community for sharing and interaction. These values extended towards the nature of living within the campus inform a distillation of private functions into a complete public and co-shared interface. Elaborating from a monastic layout, this campus sets campus living as an entirely communal experience. The determinacy of a students dormitory and the co-shared facilities to the most basic (toilet, kitchen, lounges) permeate the campus fabric without prioritising or zoning given blocks.

The Autonomy of the Library

Complementary to the primacy of indeterminate space within determined instances as means to re-examine learning environments within the campus, the university library within a campus has amassed a point of critical independence. The Follett Report of 1993 passed in the UK acknowledge the need to reconsider the library in educational institutions as one that is in need of greater funding if it where to successfully combine digital and traditional means of storing and access of books. Overall it promotes “…a new type of space to serve the new forms of library technology.”[2] This anticipated the emergence of combining teaching, learning and researching within the library building.

The report exacerbates the centrality of the campus library to the overall university organization, and where, alternative current method is the fragmentation of the library into specialised libraries, it has, however, successfully crystallise a contemporary learning experience within a single campus building. The indeterminate space Kahn choreographed in his projects is more successful in disseminating what is focalised within the contemporary university library. A new condition of library indeterminacy should be extended as means of truly recombining Kahn’s monastic definition for learning and living with an absolute state of indeterminate learning that has the possibility of actualising in every junction and rendezvous point.

Field Buildings

Sanford Kwinter defines a field as “A space of propagation of effects. It contains no matter or material points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relations of difference within fields of celerity, transmission o careering points, in a word, what Minkowski called the world”[3] This project favours the conceptual approach to field formations within a finite scale, where the consistency of the field is preserved by administrating difference and continuity. The Mosque in Cordoba is an example of a finite field building that, through time and through additions, has preserved its integrity by the recurrent use of columns and specific axes that, whilst Christian cathedrals and reliquaries have been inserted within the original mosque, an overall field stability is maintained. This formal capacity to absorb customization is an inherent quality that favours a condition of indeterminate perception and possibility of programmatic appropriation. Ultimately, as Stan Allen’s points out “More than a formal configuration, the field condition implies an architecture that admits change, accident, and improvisation. It is an architecture not invested in durability, stability, and certainty, but an architecture that leaves space for the uncertainty of the real.”[4]

Field University

Combining field strategies and the intent to allow for indeterminacy to incubate within the campus field fabric, this project seeks to re-examine learning and living within a building that is a transitional period of a given citizen. The open-source potential of indeterminacy and appropriation by the student and faculty allows for a potential infinite reconfiguration of a given plot within the city. Programmatically operational but organizationally indeterminate, the campus is a continuum within the passing of student generations and spatial interpretations of its fabric. The campus is subject to a community of 1,600 whose registry and passing into and outside the campus is immaterial to the permanent fabric of the campus, but adds to the research pool of the library that is in turn a pervasive element throughout the university.

The finite nature of this field building is important in addressing the issue of growth and contained student and living indoor campus. The dormitories serve as the punctuating elements throughout the plan, which presupposes an infinite expanse, yet when colliding with library and podium are reverted in a way where it becomes contained.

At a more discrete level, the relationship between dormitory openings such as windows and doors arrange clusters within the field that relate to the shared facilities as well as allowing for two circulation paths, a narrow private corridor and a widen public boulevard. The sharing of facilities such as kitchen, showers, toilets, further increases the condition of co-sharing and exchange to the radical extreme. Furthermore, the use of discrete changes in elevation at moments to emphasise the sense of publicness and circulation allows for a reading of the plan as a series of communities within the field or can be disregarded altogether. The reading of the building is subject to its commuity.

From within the university, it is the library that has condensed education, availability of knowledge, learning and social condensation within the campus as an autonomous building. This project takes the notion of the library as the defining agent for the dissemination of its fabric as the new campus.

The campus is the library, the library is the city.

[2] EDWARDS, Brian, FISHER, Biddy, “Libraries and Learning Resource Centres”, Architectural Press, Oxford, 2002, p.162.

[3] ALLEN, Stan, “Practice : Architecture Technique + Representation”, Routledge, New York, 2009, p. 217.

[4] Op. Cit. p.241.