This week-long Study Tour to Germany and the Netherlands forms an integral part of the studio curriculum by exposing you to high-quality architecture and landscape architecture in northern Europe. You will see significant buildings and urban spaces both in the countryside and cities centers alike. Particular emphasis is placed on innovations in spatial organization, constructive, and material expression in public buildings, museums, etc.
The sites visited, as sensory architectural experiences, provide you with an opportunity to develop your critical observation skills, as well as your diagrammatic and representational proficiency. Simultaneously, you are equipped with a vocabulary of design concepts, strategies, and materials, which can be applied in your own creative work in studio and beyond.
Tour Objectives
- Study contemporary and modernist Dutch and German building and landscape architecture
- Understand aspects of the design culture in Northern Europe where the manipulation of light, material, spatial proportion, and sequence, and integration of landscape and architecture play a fundamental role
- Develop sketching and note-taking skills for recording impressions of sites in a visual journal
Possible Activities
- Visit iconic contemporary and historical sites alike, by prominent architects such as Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, MVRDV and Gerrit Rietveld.
- Experience examples of adaptive reuse on both building and neighborhood scale
- Explore different patterns of urban development in Hamburg and Amsterdam