Studio diazmoreno garciagrinda

Cristina Díaz-Moreno and Efrén Garcia-Grinda, co-founders of cero9, the Madrid-based practice, were head of Institute of Architecture’s Studio-1 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna between the years 2019 and 2024. The studio cultivated a contemporary, plural, non-dogmatic, social-culturally engaged and optimistic approach, while believing in the necessity of radically expanding the fundamentals of architecture.

STUDENT WORK

During this semester we will pay attention to one of the most uncomfortable, dark and denied realities in Europe, the precarious settlement processes around many European cities, as the product of migration policies, exclusion, and impoverishment, but also as the result of the impact of an increasingly radicalized, populist politics. We will face them as an object of deep study and reflection, with the desire to be determined to proposing an alternative future that will improve their material and spatial conditions without any moralistic burden, but also with the aim of producing images, texts, drawings, pieces that anticipate the definition of an ideal of renewed beauty. We will do it convinced that the practice of architecture as a science and art of building, can still really have a social impact of a practical nature, but also needs to define subjective models of beauty, fine-tuned with collective ideals, that somehow protest against those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to its own self-image, hopes and aspirations, and would help to face the darkest fears and nightmares we are capable to generate. And we will do it through architecture. Nothing more than architecture. But also, deeply studying many other things but architecture. The studio work will be structured in a series of tasks running in parallel, that will be open during consecutive weeks and will increase the level of understanding of the project itself, based on discussions and investigations about the nature of these settlements, the study of relevant historical precedents, the communities inhabiting them, and their expanded context and the technical and architectural opportunities opened with this lines of inquiry. Each line of study and investigation will be accompanied with a series of instructions aiming to help addressing and developing the work.