The Vessel, the Tower, and the Ruin: Investigating Presentiments in Beginning Design

The Vessel, the Tower, and the Ruin was a sequence of exercises which combined rudimentary elements of an architectural education with tactics that oscillated between the impulsive provocation of hunches, to the ascetic discipline of rigorous measurement, to exploiting curiosities and flirting with collapse. We probed, at times in earnest and at times irreverently, what it might mean to vessel, to tower, and to ruin. We took this both literally, figuratively, metaphorically and everything in between, and we enlisted a motley crew of accomplices, some dignified by history, photography, and made famous by dynamite, and others of questionable constitution and architectural import. We operated under the premise that students of design, at the outset, need to engage their own curiosities, speculations, and urges within a framework that affords them a level of guidance while promoting individual freedom and initiative. Through and through the studio was laced with questions about creative agency and architecture’s participation within an expanded continuum of time, history, cultural aspirations and politics.