BA2 – Oh I wanna take you up to KOKOMO / TOWERS OF TEN

ABSTRACT

In line with our annual theme, better take all at once – we want to continue mixing, assembling and intensifying the humus and compost of architecture.
In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, our space has suddenly been radically limited. Our range of motion and the extent of our daily life has been reduced to a tiny footprint. One of the most drastic restrictions is the spatial limitation with which we are now all equally confronted. We have to learn to deal with the fact that we can not enact our daily habits and routines as we used to. By this, our practices and daily rituals all collide in one and the same space: our home. Our own four walls suddenly become diverse and multidimensional – the intimate place of comfort and security turns simultaneously into our office, the “home office”, a playground, a fitness studio, a theater stage, a café, a bar, a nightclub? Inevitably, functions that we have consciously (or unconsciously) spatially separated are now mixed to form an amalgam – a humus from very different programs.
[I’m stepping through the door. David Bowie]

TOTEM OF DESIRE
Together we want to rediscover, bundle and sprout our humus of ideas, fantasies and architectural worlds. We design the surreal alternative world filled with our ‘dream material’ – matter that makes us dream, arouses fantasies, takes off and lets us wander weightlessly. We create a vocabulary of (im)material qualities with which we tell spatial stories – and by that we want to bring closer what still seems so inaccessible. We want to break our horizons, which have become so small. We want to break through the boundaries of the four walls of our homes. The so cramped space becomes a rocket launching base – further and further into the infinite and beyond.
[So don’t stop me now! Freddie Mercury]

TOWERS OF TEN
We build Towers of Ten – towers that rise into the sky and have a multitude of scales in sight. No matter how small our Magic Circle, how limited the bounding box – the space we want to build is infinite. Like a Map to the Stars, we want to think the narrative vertically and see our heads in the clouds. In the sense of Humboldt: “Whenever things frighten you, it’s a good idea to measure them.” we observe closely and measure and check by translating forms. “Eventually, everything connects.” say Ray and Charles Eames and we want to make this visible. Just as wide as your shoulders we begin the journey, cross the threshold, the tree house becomes a vertical landscape, your room becomes a skyscraper.