Zero Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings, Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma of 1762, have a  peculiar position within the discipline of architecture. With their dissemination, the folio collection of six etchings have till this day nurtured architects’ speculations on the city. Since the Enlightenment, they - and in particular the Campo Marzio Plan - have fuelled research, discussions and visions for the future of architecture. These engravings are also some of the most beautiful documents in Western architectural history.

This fifth issue of SAC Journal, Zero Piranesi, is guest-edited by Peter Trummer. It celebrates Piranesi’s vision of ancient Rome and the disciplinary search of the endless realities within his Campo Marzio plan of Rome. For Trummer, Zero Piranesi suggests an architectural methodology based on a theory of replacement. With it, Piranesi’s plan of Rome is transformed into an “object plan” - a plan where multiple authors' various positions are absorbed. Thus, the “object plan” contains a kaleidoscope of ideas which form a crust of architectural speculations accumulated within.

Zero Piranesi presents the seminal projects of Peter Eisenman and Jeffrey Kipnis at the Venice Biennale in 2012 as well as new texts by, amongst others, Michael Young and Marrikka Trotter. Trummer’s own version of Campo Marzio comprises of drawings and a text that together construct Zero Piranesi. 

Finally, the journal features the award winning projects of Städelschule Architecture Class’ AIV Master Thesis Prize 2017 and 2018.

Culinary lessons

the space of food

Culinary Lessons - The Space of Food is based on a series of events hosted by the Städelschule Architecture Class that engaged with the enormous social, economic and cultural spaces that accompany the production and consumption of food. Architecture and art are deeply involved with these spaces, contributing to their formation and affected by them. In a series of hosted talks and events, Culinary Lessons attempted to unravel some their structure and dynamics. The central ambition was to learn directly or indirectly from culinary history and, not the least, the recent vanguard of culinary practitioners. No human activity is so encompassing and engenders such consequences on our societies and lives as everything that pertains to food and culinary practices and consumption. Culinary practices lay out aesthetic as much as ethical trajectories that span between century old traditions and lifesaving experiments for the future. They provide for human sustenance and the highest form of bodily enjoyment while transversing the spaces that they concurrently produce and profoundly affect. 

Culinary Lessons - The Space of Food, the fourth issue of the SAC Journal, presents a selection of the hosted events together with picture portfolios and a series of texts that chart and speculate on the relationship between architecture, art and the culinary world.

Contributors to this issue include, amongst others, Daniel Birnbaum, Charlotte Birnbaum, Mike Bouchet, Mehmet Gürs, Sanford Kwinter, Fabrice Mazliah, Tobias Rehberger, Carolyn Steel, Jan Åman, and Johan Bettum. 

This issue of the SAC Journal also includes the three prize winning projects of the SAC 2016 AIV Master Thesis Prize.

Garden State

Cinematic Space and Choreographic Time

Garden State - Cinematic Space and Choreographic Time explores the garden as a utopia wherein time and space may be thought of in architectural terms yet not easily deciphered against architecture’s traditions and practices. The garden herein is a changeable and vulnerable condition, embodying the ephemerality of life, which in turn contrasts with the customary expectations of architecture’s longevity. However, Garden State also engages with the contemporary arts, specifically video, cinema and ballet, and with this engagement time and space open up with new, fragile dimensions. A choreographic framework emerges which is at once more precise yet loose, more responsive yet open, than that space architecture normally engenders. Choreographed movement differs from that prescribed by the calculable paths so often invoked in the spatial syntax of latter-day architecture. The garden emerges as a state, in all its social glory, a realm that we already occupy but perhaps never can own?

Contributors to this issue include: William Forsythe, Horst Bredekamp, Sanford Kwinter, Mark Wigley, Douglas Gordon, Tobias Rehberger, Philippe Pirotte, Fang Hu and Sou Fujimoto, Daniel Birnbaum and Johan Bettum. Also included are the three finalist projects for 2014 SAC AIV Master Thesis Prize.
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MEDIATED ARCHITECTURE

Vivid, Effervescent and Nervous

Mediated Architecture - Vivid, Effervescent and Nervous presents three projects designed at SAC during the last eight years. The three projects are: The Theatre of Immanence (2007), an installation and exhibition project in Städelschule’s Portikus gallery; Digital Bodies (2013-14), an experimental research project; and Orkhēstra (2014), which was an installation on a large, public square in Frankfurt and part of the Frankfurt Luminale, Biennale of Lighting Culture. The projects vary in scale and nature from gallery installation via laboratory-style modelling experiment to an urban intervention. They span a period in which architecture’s contribution to the production of space has become increasingly mediated by technology. Each in their own way, the three projects probe this condition and explore new design opportunities given to architecture. The results are vivid, effervescent and nervous - and always mediated. Accompanying extensive portfolios of drawings and pictures are texts that expound on the theoretical and practical implications of each project. 

Text contributors to SAC JOURNAL  No. 2 include: Sanford Kwinter, Daniel Birnbaum, Maraike Bückling, Sebastian Oschatz, Mathias Wollin, Peter Trummer, Mirco Becker and Johan Bettum.

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A NEW MANIFOLD

The inaugural issue of SAC JOURNAL addresses the increased specialisation and possible fragmentation of expertise within architecture. Whilst historically always an amalgam of numerous forms of input, architecture is currently facing the necessity to assimilate and process hitherto unknown amounts and rates of information flow. How can architecture relate to the emerging forms of specialisation within the discipline - not the least in its pedagogy and academic programmes? The issue uses the academic programme of the Städelschule Architecture Class to reflect on these questions. The work presented comprises the finalists for the AIV Master Thesis Prize 2013.

Contributors to SAC JOURNAL No. 1  - A New Manifold include: Beatriz Colomina, Ben van Berkel, Mirco Becker, Christian Veddeler, and Johan Bettum.

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