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SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND

The project of the studio is to design a School for the Blind and multiply-disabled.

Numerous innovations at the forefront of current technologies emerge from the consideration of corporeal limitation--bodies impaired in their mobility or sensation. In displacing, amplifying, and recircuiting the sensory limits of the body tothe spaces and objects that surround it, they provide an extended field for critically rethinking the relation between the technological and the material. At the limit of a modern logic of rationalization and technological progress, sensationprovides a means of exploring the intersection between emergent technologies and design through a logic of bodilyintuition. The sensory-- as perception, experience and response--provides the three conceptual components, which structure a critical reconsideration of 'institution' by problematizing the proper (propre), practice (praxis), and programming, respectively.

The studio proposes an intensive environment for research of emergent technologies and their reciprocal relation with thematerial conditions of constructing architecturally. The studio will explore the history of experimentation in architecture asintimately linked to technological events, which induce shifts in modes of architectural thinking and design research. Developments in materials research, the technologies of recording and visualization, processes of fabrication andconstruction, will be critically extended by a history of innovative design research in architecture.

NOTES

Studio Critic: Michelle Fornabai
Spring 2004