ABOUT TEAM STUDENTS BRIEFS ADMISSION
SUPER ANCIENT - HYPER MODERN
Rituals and Symbolic Space
Winter Term 2023/24
We ventured back into prehistory to one of the origins of architecture, to visit neolithic megaliths in Portugal. Standing stones, dolmen, mounds and stone circles.
These are places of intense significance, yet we know very little about their purpose, their meaning, or their role in the societies that constructed them. These structures may be ancient, yet they act forcefully in the present. They are incredibly meaningful but, because they are empty of specific meaning, are sites where meaning is projected onto them. They often provoke reactions to their visitors — acts of ritual that themselves are invented.
Folklore tales that promise specific actions with specific stones will cure diseases, manifest marriage or fertility. We could attribute part of their ‘power’ to their material and spatial arrangement. They are precise and economical in the way they define particular types of space. Their assemblages might be both primitive, but also remind us of conceptual art. Not architecture as shelter, but architecture as symbolic space. Through gathering information about rituals associated with these sites, detailed digital records of the shapes of tomes and their arrangement, the studio developed ideas in a multitude of scales, for a series of new ‘Rituals of the Usual’.
Group 1: ‘Waiting For’ - Christiane Braml, Hümeyra Çam, Marlene Ortner, Sofie Wetten
Group 2: ‘The Mot’ - John Clayson, Erfan Khosravi, Jonas Ramoser, Mikael Ristmets
Group 3: ‘Casino Temple- A Journey Through Illusion‘ - Yurii Brytov, Mihaela Carpov, Angelica Cher, Mariia Gross
Group 4: ‘Taste The Space/ Moss Tea House’ - Hoda Balouchi, Igor Ivanec, Mintong Lu, Matthew Simpson
Group 5: ‘Under the Roof’ - Zhongzheng Zhang
Group 6: Allen Bell, Mohammad Sajad Ghaderi, Melika Hadjarzadeh, Eda Sefa