The 'City' is a holistic and intimate space that we experience, rather than merely a space that surrounds us in a bigger scale. There are various elements in a city such as people, cars, roads, land, and space. In this course, students will examine the urban phenomena and make a building that vitalizes them. The program will be a mixed use complex containing offices, commercial buildings, dwellings and open space. Therefore, understanding the various architectural themes of space, composition, structure, and form is required.

The 5th Year Graduation Project is a culmination of the previous 4 years of architectural inquiry, both in terms of design, history, and theory. In this way, it is also a synthesis and statement about what we have learned along the way.

‘Back to Basics’ is a self-conscious inquiry about revisiting our architectural journey. It is a chance for us to make our own thesis about, ‘What is Architecture?’ The question is raw, basic, and reductive. It is also layered with insecurities about architecture’s future. What role should it play? What is our personal perspective on it? What is its societal role? To get us started we can think about three essential texts and the questions they pose:

1.     Is Architecture Elements? At the 2014 Venice Biennale, architect and curator Rem Koolhaas stated that architecture is merely the essential elements which constitute it. Walls, ceilings, windows, and mechanical equipment are all fragments to be reassembled according to technical and cultural considerations.
2.     Is Architecture Typology? Rafael Moneo states there are enduring types of architecture that communicate their use through form. The ultimate contribution for an architect is to invent a type that is so general that his/her work becomes anonymous.
3.     Is Architecture Language? Aldo Rossi posits that a city’s elements are like language: signs and symbols that can be recombined. Drawing itself is analogous to writing: It is no longer a representation of reality, but an autonomous act in of itself. Buildings themselves can become representations - their forms, like words, something for architects to play with.

Armed with these ideas and more, we will revisit our portfolio of projects from 1st year to now, and critically confront our failures. We will on the other hand put our successes into an armored safe box and protect them with our lives as if they were invaluable heirlooms for the next generation. We will make clumsy (at first) meta-narratives about our path from then to now. We will post-rationalize and create our own autobiographies. Most of it might be true. Some of it will be blatant lies. All of it for the sake of getting ‘Back to Basics.'

Our self-selected sites will merely be a skeleton from which to hang our ideas. Some of us will revel in the actual materiality of the site if that is what we believe we should do. We might ‘respect’ the context, and sensitively reconstitute its scale. For the rest of us, the site will be a fiction, a thin excuse to legitimize our otherwise ridiculous ideas. In the end, we will make our own rules, sticking close to them as if they are our lifeboat, lighthouse, lifeline, or some other life-thing. Because without these rules we might sink and lose forever that distant sparkle of when we use to believe in something.