In tandem with various lines of research in the school which hover around the subject of Representation - a series of workshops

were run in the middle school called Intermedia. The workshop week fell between the two halves of the semester and thus offered a break from the studio routine and a chance to see a project afresh. The name was chosen for a number of happily coincidental reasons. As a wide variety of modes of representaion were to be used Crucial to the workshops was the idea that representation as a mode of interpretation and production of architecture. This status as par t of the process of production of architecture really took hold in the Renaissance which Diana Agrest describes as a moment of separation between the field of construction and that of drawing. This break from the tradition by which buildings were produced within the system of medieval guilds allowed abstract thought to guide the process of design as separate from the process of construction. Fish have no This instrumental aspect of representation is something to which we as architects are often blind largely because we use it to illustrate a project which we consider finshed, rather than generating a project through the act of representation itself. Milton Glaser: The computer is to graphic design what the microwave is to food. Students a re encouraged to use computers as part of the design process but to be aware of what medium is appropriate to what task. Certain processes can be greatly sped up like melting butter. But you would not make a whole cake with it. Regardless of the tools being used the key thing to be cultivated is an embodied sense of the scale of lived space.

By mixing media the architect can remain in control of the instrumental power of representation not see is a Plastic Emotion moment of separation between the field of construction and that of drawing (as a tool) that occurs during the Renaissance is crucial. This separation allowed abstract thought to guide the process of design as separate from the process of construction. The mode of representation becomes a part of the process of production of architecture Three different texts drawing, writing and buildind Techniques of representaion allow mfor different models of interpretation and production of architecture A system of representation such as perspective is not just a technique but an ideology that allows for a rationale to be developed that would make the representation seem natural and thus invisible as such.

Le Corbusier came to recognize this. I seelooking back after all these years, he wrote in 1955 just a decade before his death, that my entire intellectual activity has been directed towards the manifestation of space. I am a man of space, not only mentally but physically. . .5 Nine years earlier, in the short treatise Lespace indicible, Le Corbusier had proclaimed a new theory of architecture, one that held space to be a uniquely 20th-century venustas, the Vitruvian delight that had been absent from earlier modern movement theories. As he described it, this space was a peculiar, decidedly ineffable space; it was not a static,

absolute, and objective entity, but rather a relative sensation, a vibration between the action of the work (architecture, statue, or painting) and the reaction of the setting: the walls of the room, the public squares . . . the landscape. He insisted on avant-garde painting as precedent for this phenomenon, indeed, on its having provoked the phenomenon, and he closed his treatise by noting: The essential thing that will be said here is that the release of aesthetic emotion is a special function of space.6 Fish has no experience of water We are all subject to the ground-rules, that is, the rules and unperceived effects that govern our ground or context. It is like asking a fish to suddenly become aware of water. McLuhan observed, One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in. It is only when it is pulled from the water that the fish becomes acutely aware of its former environment. The challenge in achieving the awareness to notice the formerly unnoticed what we call integral awareness of our total business environment is to create anappropriate anti-environment. These modes are not neutral but instrumental in the generation of architecture as the close correlation of perspective and Renaissance urban spaces shows Two paradoxical situations have resulted from the use of the computer in architecture: one is the resugence of perspective, facilitated by computer programs; the other, and more important, is the reunificaiton of the process of representation in the production of design and the process of construction. Design and fabrication are linked together

Intermedia Workshop based teaching - week-long sessions to develop their project within a specific representational optic - be that photography, hard-line drawing, computer modelling, charcoal sketching, perspective or plaster cast. A chance to inhabit a room - the space of the mind. On the one hand an opportunity to learn skills with which to quickly test ideas and visualise design proposals but also a step into the world of ideas hovering around the word representation. Milton Glaser: The computer is to graphic design what the microwave is to food. In his essay Representation as Research: Design Model and Media Rotation, Dagmar Reinhart makes the argument for: a design methodology that frames representation as an instrument of invention which is not an end product but an active component at phases of ideation, conceptualisation, experimentation and visualisation in the creative design process This idea of representation as an operative and explorative methodology is a departure from its current position in architectural practice as a mere tool of illustration - in Reinharts words it can be a strategy for producing ideas. Based on this foundation we propose training workshops in which students will learn specific skills in a variety of digital and analog media - from model-making to light simulation and from bricolage to Photoshop. Objective The aim of Mondays studio is twofold. The first is to discover the process of designing through doing, by

testing ones project through various media it is hoped that students will learn to look at their project in many different ways and at many different scales. The second objective is to teach students how to represent in a clear way their concepts and designs, thus enabling them to identify & clarify their design objectives throughout the project.

Intermedia The traditional path of a design studio project entails a steady stepping up of scales, with students moving gradually from strategy to detail along a linear trajectory. The intermedia course offers a shift in medium rather than scale as a means to progress the design project. An optic is selected, be it that of plaster, photography, perspective or orthographics and the project is studied for a week through this lens. This application of restraint allows a release from the confines of the project; a side stepping that permits a certain prospect of the process from without. The students are encouraged to accept and and work with/against the confines of the medium to develop their project spatially rather than organisationally

To take hold of representation, to discover its instrumentality

The evaporation of object into sensation and the aura-like atmosphere that resulted from this transformation were recurrent themes in Le Corbusiers work, and as early as 1946 he labeled it lespace indicibleineffable spaceand offered it as a progressive mode of architecture for the postwar, electronic era. Le Corbusier defined ineffable space as a vibration between the action of the work (architecture, statue, or painting) and the reaction of the setting: the walls of the room, the public squares . . . the landscape, comparing this vibration to the magnification of space achieved by Cubists around 1910.(18) It is, he said, the equivalent of their fourth dimension, the moment of limitless escape evoked by an exceptionally just consonance of the plastic means employed.