SNU Studio 5-1 2020
 
We have recently seen a dramatic rise in fundamentalist thinking: Painted in black and white, multifaceted situations are reduced into ‘twitter manifestoes’ conjuring closed borders, polarized politics, and in the worst-case, extremist violence.
 
Architecture on the other hand is inherently complex, linked to sites, histories, and peoples. If fundamentalism is winning, architecture with all its nuanced contingencies is losing: As a profession, we are increasingly ill-equipped to reduce our theories into sound-bites. Therefore, our ideas, grounded in diversity, cannot ‘battle’ one-sided reductive thinking. Or can they?
 
‘Back to Basics’ is a self-conscious inquiry into the question, ‘What is Architecture?’ The question is raw, reductive, and ideological. It is also layered with insecurities about architecture’s future. What societal roles should it play? To get us started, we looked at the questions within 3 essential texts:
 
1. Is Architecture Elements? At the 2014 Venice Biennale, curator Rem Koolhaas stated that architecture is merely elements. Walls, ceilings, windows, and mechanical equipment are all fragments, and their reconciliation is a myth.
 
2. Is Architecture Typology? Rafael Moneo claimed enduring types communicate their use through form. An architect’s ultimate contribution is to invent a type so general that his/her work becomes anonymous.
 
3. Is Architecture Language? Aldo Rossi posits that a city’s elements, like language, are signs and symbols. Drawing itself is like writing: It is no longer a representation of reality, but an autonomous act in of itself.
 
Culminating our previous 4 years of architectural studies, ‘Back to Basics’ takes what we learned and hones it into a reductive thesis. Even if our principles border on the absurd, we will stick to them like a lifeboat. Because without these fundamentals, we might forever lose that distant sparkle of a time when we used to believe in something.