Fall 2021
Fiction in architecture

Lady Silkscreen poster created during a residency at Confort Moderne in Poitiers and printed for the Less Playboy Is More Cowboy event in May 2010. © David Evrard, artist.

The seminar will offer a critical view on the powers of hierarchies at play in contemporary metropolitan landscapes. By understanding how fictions change (the perception of) the real, architects can redefine their role in the processes of urban transformation. Students will document the making of fictions in architecture and elaborate collective tales. Guest speakers will introduce a variety of fictional approaches as strategic tools for emancipating spaces and communities from new forms of narrative domination.

The course is structured in two parts.

In a first stage, after a general introduction to the shift from representation towards fiction, the course includes the particular analysis of different movies and moviemakers during the German expressionist period, by observing the relationship between architecture, fiction and a particular moment in art history which had a great influence on many artists and designers in the following decades of modern art history. Invited guests, such as contemporary artists, moviemakers and historians, are offering insight into their methodologies, tools and attitudes based on their body of work.

In a second stage, students either improve or test ways of creating their own fiction in a small group based on a real site in Luxembourg or its greater region. The particular site can be chosen by the group, but the theme should be put in relationship with past, existing or future developments and trends. The chosen representational means are an important part of this seminar. Students are invited to enhance their graphic, representational and rhetoric skills in order to tell their commonly elaborated fiction in a precise and powerful manner.