‘Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.’ 
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social aims

Continuing its research into the contemporary city, DIP1 will this year focus on the relationship between language and architecture. We will investigate how urban form operates as a medium of communication – not only visually, but also semantically, politically and culturally.

Cities are typically seen as functional systems: networks of infrastructure, zones of economic activity and sites of occupation. While these frameworks are crucial, they rarely capture the full emotional and symbolic weight of urban life. Students are invited to ask: what if the city were conceived not in a utilitarian sense, but as an expression of relationships and aspirations?

The studio will initially draw from the potential of two case studies: Horace Walpole’s playful narrative approach in Strawberry Hill House in London and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s obsessive exploration of detail in Stonborough House in Vienna.

Subsequently, each student will observe and explore contemporary urban concerns and investigate a specific site – real or speculative – as a field of linguistic inquiry. Through developing tectonic vocabularies, projects may take the form of buildings, fragments, typological interventions or urban strategies that interrogate how urban morphology has the potential to encode and transmit meaning. 

Our process will be supported by research, drawing, model-making and critical writing. We will continue our interest in literature and its generative relationship to architecture, and broaden this to include the nascent territory of prompt-based architectural design. DIP1 proposes that to design a city is not simply to shape matter, but to compose meaning: to write, edit and translate the spaces through which we live.