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Pavilionism
Gerrit Rietveld AcademyStudents' work, page 1 of 4
00. Since 2000, we teach (one day a week) at the graphic design department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam). We certainly see teaching as a part of our daily design pursuits, but as we're writing this, we still haven't figured out a good way to give this activity (teaching) a good place in this archive.
One possibility would be to put all our assignments online, in the form of a small database; basically a bunch of texts that we wrote for students, to explain assignments such as our beloved 'New Beatle Death Clues'.
Point is, even if we decide to add such a database to this site, we still would like to finish a lot of other things first: the complete online archive of work, the links section, the news section, etc. etc. Only after we completed all these things, we would feel ready to work on such a database.
Having said all this, we still would like to add some Rietveld material to this site.
As a result of a project we did with our students during the last semester, we have some really nice photographs floating around in our mailboxes and attachment folders.
Honestly, it really isn't our intention to use this site as a showcase for students' work: first of all, our site would get flooded. And secondly, it would be too time-consuming to document, collect and format all the work. So that certainly isn't our plan. But that doesn't mean we can't make an exception once in a while. So on the following pages we want to show you a small selection of students' work.
In short something about the assignment. It all started when we attended a lecture by Dan Graham, in which he showed his beautiful pavilions. We were immediately inspired to turn this into an assignment. Basically, we asked the students to do something with the idea of the pavilion as a medium in itself. Or better put, to explore the concept of the maquette (scale model). The emphasis on the maquette was important to us, as we didn't want to turn the project into a proper 'architectural' assignment.
For us, the assignment had much more to do with the idea of the maquette as a format in its own right. We were also quite interested in the idea of infiltrating an aesthetic that was not our own, looking at architecture as complete outsiders.
(We know, it must sound really vague. What can we say? You had to be there, we guess).
Anyway. While we were doing research for this assignment, together with the students, we noticed a certain type of photograph that we came across in countless architectural magazines and books: the picture of the architect with his/her maquette. This picture really turned out to be a very archetypical image in architecture, and we collected dozens of examples. This actually became the inspiration for another project, a short follow-up assignment. We asked the students to make pictures of themselves, together with their maquettes.
Shown on the following pages you can see a small selection of these pictures. In other words, the work featured in this section is not designed by us; it's designed by our students. The names of these students are, in order of appearance: Clare McNally, Rebecca Stephany, Lane Gry Kristensen, Risto Kalmre, Ian Brown and Jens Schildt.
Again, this is just a small selection. We wish we could show all pictures, but that would swallow up too much space. We think for now, these will do.
(c) Experimental Jetset 97-06
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Image:
Le Corbusier, Ville radieuse (1930)
Related Links: Fondation Le Corbusier
Rietveld Academy, Class of 2005