The Building Store: Direct Modelling as a Studio Process

Abstract

This article describes a series of design studios which followed a practice familiar to the drawing class—to prescribe limited but facilitating means at the same time that topic and task are assigned. We were concerned, in a climate dominated by second-hand graphic and literary ideas, to simplify the conditions for making architecture, as in the drawing class one simplifies to address more directly representation and expression. The Building Store offered media with which to compose built form and space by directly modelling it, without the complexities of translation and transfer which tend to overwhelm our difficult and diffusive art.Five successive studios are described, each of which explored various potentials of this procedure. The first states recurring principles; the second recognizes interplay with a “field”; the third introduces a more instrumental inventory; the fourth develops documentation practice; and the fifth raises questions of architectural detail.