#1. GIANTESSE ARCHITECTURE
If you follow DLW, you may have noticed that we have a thing for giantesse. Giantesse is a
digital artform that renders giant humans crushing skyscrapers with their bare hands, stomping
on city scapes, and even snapping the phallic Washington Monument in-half. It's been described
as a “deviant art”. During the pandemic, giantesse has grown in popularity and curiosity in the
nascent artform is rising. Despite it's erotic appeal, DLW is personally interested in giantesse as
a form of architectural critique and as having potential to become a new architectural aesthetic.
What might an architecture look like drawn from this niche, digital artform? Could giantess have
potential to become a new memetic form of design criticism?
The challenge:
A. Design a building for 23 meter tall people at a site of your choice.
- The only rule is that your building cannot displace an existing building. Your site
must be empty.The building’s function is up to you. Note that the building will
accommodate both giantesse people and standard-sized people
- Research and Develop an aesthetic style for your building based off of giantesse
imagery from the internet. Note: some of the images can be very explicit so be careful.
- Precedents: Lacaton Vassal proposal for Architecture Foundation in London
(unbuilt)
B. Make collages of giantesse figures in cities and landscapes, and post them onto a new
meme page. Use the artform as a mode of critiquing your built environment. What
buildings would you like to dropkick? Chop in half? Or make out with?
#2. RE-PRESENT / RE-GENT
Representation is at least as important as spatial design. Tone, setting and type of a drawing all
matter at least as much as its content. (re)mixing imagery used to sell projects into new
constellations lays bare the hidden motivations behind them.
- Rework existing impressions, drawings and photographs of new and old buildings in
Gent into a new, subversive collaged cityscape. Attack all elements of the city:
scale/orientation/function/meaning/shape/etc. The slicker the original renderings, the
stronger the subversive power of your new collages world.
- Construct a narrative along with the collage: your drawing is a manifesto. But what for?
All year Gentse Feesten? Flooding the city centre? Putting new highways straight
through cozy neighbourhoods? Building huge housing projects in the middle of
intersections? Making all of Gent’s public buildings accessible to 23 meter tall
giantesses? Don’t think of a statement before you start: drawing and meaning will
happen simultaneously.
#3 WORM'S EYE PERSPECTIVES
DLW’s hypothesis is that the worm’s eye perspective is a strong tool for distancing the
(architectural) image from its potentially problematic function as a method for selling design.
Worm’s eye perspectives (weird bottom-up nephews of the common bird’s eye view, if you will)
don’t make anyone happy for the wrong reasons. Also, they’re pretty neat, and can
accommodate giantesses perfectly - from below, everybody looks 23 meters tall.
- Design or retrofit a temporary public space/place for the Gentse Feesten. This space can
be either inside or outside, occupy any number of people (with a minimum of 1), be
easily accessible or deliberately very hard to reach, make use of existing structures or be
totally new, be a building or a square or anything in between, etc. Whatever works!
- Your space is a device for re-interpreting both the city and the festival. Hanging out and
drinking beer is possible everywhere already; your space needs to critically engage the
user with her or his surroundings and/or fellow citizens and/or the concept of a social
gathering like the Gentse Feesten.
- It is forbidden to consider the sustainability of your proposal. Saying your scheme is
‘green’ is a cop-out anyway.
- It is forbidden to involve covid into your proposal. If people need to distance themselves
in your proposal it is because you want to illustrate that society has become a loose
gathering of alienated individuals who lack the skills to intimately engage with one
another offline. If people need to get extremely close together in your proposal it is
because you want to illustrate that society has become a loose gathering of alienated
individuals who lack the skills to intimately engage with one another offline.
- Represent your proposal through worm’s eye perspectives only. You’re not pitching your
proposal to the city council or potential sponsors, you’re making a point about the
functioning of the public realm.
