Collaborators: Ken Tadashi Oshima, The Raymond Farm Center for Living Arts & Design, The University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives
Concept
How does architecture shape our life and our life shape architecture? Certain architects have constructed their life through their practice. These practices have directly engaged the environment and allowed the architects to embody design as life.
To study this process and answer our question, we will study The Raymond Farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania by Antonin and Noémi Raymond. The Farm was conceived as a place to live out a design practice and learn through doing and making. The Raymonds sought to synthesize modernism with craft traditions, especially those of Japan. The studio will posit an architectural intervention at the Farm to further the work and sustain the legacy of Antonin and Noémi Raymond. We will approach this task through the thinking and methods of Architectural Behaviorology.
Antonin Raymond was an architect who was born in 1888 and studied in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), working later in the United States and Japan under Cass Gilbert and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1939, he and his wife Noémi founded the farm in New Hope as a place of learning. He died on the farm in 1976. While Wright remained a strong influence, his time in Japan and encounters with Japanese modern architects like Junzo Yoshimura had a profound effect. Raymond’s most important work was as an interpreter between different cultures, bridging understandings of craft, aesthetics, and tectonics and operating at multiple scales from buildings to furniture.
Architectural Behaviorology is a design methodology devised by Atelier Bow-Wow for the exploration and understanding of architectural form as a social language that encompasses both human behavior and physical phenomena and reaches to building typology and our effect on nature. The method uses Actor-Network Theory with drawing analysis to illustrate spaces and their related transformations of the environment.
The studio will rely on some key collaborators. The first is Ken Tadashi Oshima, an expert on Raymond’s work and Japanese Architecture. He will join us for the launch of the studio and reviews. We will also work closely with the Raymond Farm Center for Living Arts & Design and the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives to better understand the context of Raymond’s work.
The studio will pursue the following topics:
- Architectural Behaviorology
- Actor-Network Hand Drawing
- Architectural design method of Antonin Raymond
- Design intervention for the Raymond Farm with a 1:1 study of material and craft
- Visual Research Report on the process and result of design intervention and the 1:1 study
Work will be done both individually and in groups of three. We will travel to New Hope and spend time on the Raymond Farm. We will also visit the UPenn Architecture Archives to see the Raymond papers. Additional visits to related sites of craft and design like the Nakashima Foundation, Hancock Shaker Village and the James Rose Center will be included.
