Architecture Studio Teaching: Breath-taking Architecture

Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron share the same interest towards innovation in architecture. Koolhaas is in search of "a certain breakthrough" as declared in his 2011 conference at the Barbican Centre. For Herzog & de Meuron, the materials they use in new ways and with innovative juxtapositions are both a source of inspiration and their final architectural aim. Koolhaas works on existing architectural programs in the same way as programming a computer. He introduces data and redesigns preexisting software, resulting in a series of captivating spaces, never before seen, that can accommodate flexible and variable architectural programs. Herzog & de Meuron start from a space of total freedom: "We have no recipe, no ideological basis, as for example Rossi or the modernists had." (Capezzuto, 2000) It is worth investigating their works and the way they do architecture in order to understand how „the new‟ can create breakthroughs in the development of truly breath-taking architecture. What are the effects on the architectural process of starting from the materials' expressiveness? What can we learn by starting from the outside in, from texture architecture? In which way can these ideas be used in teaching architecture? This study gives a set of teaching points and concept strategies to be investigated in the architecture studio.