Re-enacting Tacit Knowledge

During the 20th century, some of the most interesting experiments in architectural education developed outside the traditional institutions, within collaborative international summer schools. The summer school ‘Re-enacting Tacit Knowledge: 20th Century Architecture Summer Schools’ is part of a collaboration between the Horizon 2020 research project ‘TACK/Communities of Tacit knowledge: architecture and its ways of knowing’ and the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI). Exploring methods of fictocriticism, performance and re-enactment – and their entanglement with queer and feminist theory – participants reflect on the social and embodied dimensions of tacit knowledge and architectural education more broadly. In the first phase, participants consult HNI archival holdings related to key summer schools and participate in seminars with architectural historians (Dirk van den Heuvel, Elke Couchez), theorists (Angelika Schnell, Eva Sommeregger, Hélène Frichot, Claudia Slanar, Albena Yaneva) and former participants of the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) and Salzburg Sommerakademie. In the second phase, participants engage in their own re-enactment of the charette exercise from the 1986 ILAUD residential workshop, transposed from the original site in Sienna to Rotterdam. This study culminates in a final presentation performed ‘in character’ in the style of the schools that took part in the early years of ILAUD, including ETH, AHO (Oslo), ETSA (Barcelona), KU Leuven and MIT.

Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete (supervisor), Hamish Lonergan, Jana Scheithauer (student assistant – Rotterdam), Martin Rösch (student assistant – Zurich)