This call is for team leads (Fellows) for the summer 2018 session of Critical Practice Studio. Team leads, a blend between teaching mentors and visionary professionals, are awarded a CRITPraX Fellowship. Critical Practice Studio is a summer entry experience for graduate students at Lawrence Tech in the Architecture, Interior Design, Urban Design and MFA Social Practice degrees. It is a team-based, competitive charrette/workshop style studio that meets in four multi-day sessions over the summer. The studio is focused around the work and vision of an acknowledged and accomplished designer or practice involved in a critical practice; a masterclass. This year the master practitioner is Austin+Mergold (http://www.austin-mergold.com/). The master practitioner frames the overall studio and sets the focus and the topics for the team projects. Each student team is organized around the Fellow, a second experienced practitioner who leads the studio group.

This summer's experimental projects will be based around the methodologies and philosophies formulated by Austin+Mergold, a practice that blends landscape architecture, architecture and urban design. The experience this summer is American Spolia, a process of slow architecture engaging vernacular landscapes. Projects run fast with team direction provided by the Fellow in response to the

For example of past work, visit the CRITPraX website (http://criticalpractice.ltu.edu/)

Team leads spend 10 weeks developing a series of short projects guiding a group of eight to twelve students. Personal agendas playing out within the overall studio topic are expected and required. These positions should be inherent and visible in the application, building off the central philosophies and methods of the lead practitioner.

Application

The Fellowship is a 10-week position that requires on-ground presence at four weekend workshops. Formal studio meetings are at the Southfield, Detroit campus on the following schedule:

May 18-20, 2018 (course kickoff/introduction – Charrette One);

June 1-3, 2018 (Charrette Two);

June 22-24, 2018 (Charrette Three);

July 13-15, 2018 (gallery review – Post-Production).

Studio experience starts at 9:00 am on Friday morning and concludes at 2:00 pm on Sunday during each session. Fellows will also meet with their teams on a flexible schedule between workshop sessions in order to guide and develop the project outcomes (10 hours min. direct contact). These interactions might be virtual using digital modalities rather than physical meetings.

Fellows will be awarded a stipend for summer efforts equivalent to an adjunct teaching salary.

Application requirement: short statement of position that considers acts of speculation, narrative, prototyping and relational pursuits. In addition, provide a portfolio focused on recent writing, projects and products (8 items max) and supporting documentation (photograph/illustration). All sub-disciplines of applied design are eligible for the Fellowship (architectural design, urban design, interior design, industrial design, interaction design, graphic design, etc).

Applications should be emailed to Philip Plowright at pplowright@ltu.edu by April 10, 2018. The jury will notify selected Fellows by Friday, April 20, 2018. Email subject line should be “CRITPraX18 Fellowship”.

The 2018 Master Practitioner for the summer Critical Practice experience is Austin+Mergold.

www.austin-mergold.com

Having practiced for over a decade in the United States, Austin+Mergold have realized that all their work refers back to the relentless desires to make sense and use of the various debris of the [recent] past. Having reflected on this further, Austin+Mergold decided to consider their work as the pursuit of American Spolia.

American spolia is a search for a possibility of creating new cultural meaning out of existing context that is decidedly “not ancient”. The medieval builders may have opted to reuse Roman columns primarily because they were too laborious (or, given the state of craft in the early middle ages, simply impossible) to re-fabricate. They then discovered serendipitously that those old artefacts had also augmented the meaning of the new context, thus stimulating a distinctive cultural practice. In our contemporary situation, what would encourage reuse of building parts that are so inexpensive, so readily available off-the-shelf in great quantities and often so laborious to remove from their original contexts, to jumpstart a cultural practice of reimagining our legacy infrastructure, built environment, landscapes, objects and ideas from the last two centuries? An abstract desire to keep durable materials out of landfill is a good start, but perhaps this do-good attitude alone is not enough to carry a contemporary phenomenon of spolia.

In search of these additional stimuli, Austin+Mergold consider art historians’ explanations for the existence of spolia applied to contemporary context. For example, as related to vinyl siding – can there be convenience and availability, profanation or exorcism, damnatio memorea, political legitimization, aesthetic wonderment or admiration. And in addition to these considerations, there exists a dire need to stop tapping into virgin materials and to learn to defamiliarize and decontextualize artifacts of the recent past instead, to find useful applications for the mountains of things (materials, products, objects, even ideas) that we already have.

The aim of this meta-project is to chart the ancient practice of spolia in the context of contemporary [American] architectural practice from the standpoint of designers, builders, and educators on the platform of practice of Austin+Mergold.

Austin+Mergold has just won the 2018 City of Dreams Pavilion Competition

https://archpaper.com/2018/02/winner-2018-city-dreams-pavilion-competition-announced/

CRITPraX runs as four intensive workshop charrettes over the summer semester.

Sessions start at 10:00 am on Friday morning and run through to working presentations on Sunday, ending at 2:00 pm. The weeks between sessions are for design teams to refine, develop and produce outcomes based on the proposal by the critical master practitioner.

The dates for Summer 2018 CRITPraX workshops are:

May 18-20, 2018 (course kickoff/introduction – Charrette One);

June 1-3, 2018 (Charrette Two);

June 22-24, 2018 (Charrette Three); and

July 13-15, 2018 (gallery review – Post-Production).

CRITPraX is proud to offer Fellowships to the following exceptional practitioners for the Summer 2017 program:

Victoria Mcreynolds, Texas Tech, Texas

Could be Architecture (Joseph Altshuler + Zack Morrison), Chicago

Elise Dechard, Detroit

Team B (David Corns + Quinn Kummer), Cincinnati

SubStudio (Hannah Dewhirst + Ingrid Schmidt), Detroit/Cincinnati