The Studio proposes the Research by Design approach, for which design is an instrument to explore and critically address reality rather than a problem-solving practice. Models, drawings, images and texts are tools to investigate and expose the contradictions that give form to our world. 
The rise of the digital revolution is generating a crisis that has some analogies with both the 1920s and the 1950s, inasmuch as new forms of production based on new forms of social and economic relationships are emerging and demand the imagination of an architecture that could give them form. Through models, drawings, text and images, the studio challenges and reinterprets the idea of Social Condenser today, and verify whether it could be still relevant to imagine future scenarios for the city. At the same time we will challenge the very idea of the city vis-à-vis the explosion of urbanization on a planetary scale.
This project questions the ideologies of theories of Brutalism. Today, reflecting upon Brutalism is a way to interrogate the potential of an ethic stance in architecture, in light of the rise of scarcity and austerity as the horizon of new forms of life and production.
 Initiated with a collage based design using three “Brutalist” projects: Institute of Education, Alexandra Road, and Hayward Gallery. We argued the idea of resembling and fracturing a building and proposed a design that separates the 3 projects through a simple assembly and connect them with a promenade. Alexandra road was the only project that was manipulated in exterior form by a series of stacking. Theories of new brutalism and ideas of social condensers from Russian constructivists merged together in contemporary fashion to produce this infrastructure that purpose was to isolate “smart” individuals from the stupidity that contemporary society allows. This is a sanctuary to free intellectual thoughts and ideas to produce meaningful technologies or discoveries within the design. 





Instructor: Davide Saccone & Jad Semaan
Partner:  Josh de Gracia & Carlos Uruchurtu