Tectonics in Building Culture: Stone

The cultivation of a tectonic approach towards building is a strong source of power and renewal. And one of the key lessons is prototyping at full scale. This is the approach we tried to work with over the last five years on the Erasmus Intensive Programme series ‘Tectonics in Building Culture’ and ‘Building Anatomy’. Instead of materialising conceptual ideas, students were forced to work physically with a concrete building material. The process of generating ideas was shifted towards that of development – a notion that Mies van der Rohe always preferred to use instead of design. In all the past summer workshops the potential of physical materials opened a field of thought that nourished the design process and generated structures and forms through the act of building.