Its forms can no more exist outside architecture that the form of a sonata can exist outside music. The studio will investigate these and similar ideas in connection to the reconstruction of the Asclepeion at Pergamon. Students will be given an incomplete fragment of the antique building to their own designs and in accordance with a contemporary brief for a Business School. The building will be sited in the contemporary context of a university campus. Reconstruction here is not to be confused with archaeological restitution.
Reconstruction here means inventive re-building.
Students should address, therefore, the contemporary functional, constructional, formal and symbolic relevance of the building they will design. That is so because architecture speaks of tradition always in a modern voice. That is why, so very often the past is so very real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement. That is why a tiny scrap of recollected happiness can turn our memories into a work of art and can inspire us to contemplate within ourselves.