Before I dive into the meat of the lecture presented by Jacques Gubler, I feel like I need to place it in context.

First, Jacques Gubler arrived in Santiago de Compostela on Friday in time for our crit and was generally around for the rest of the week. Whether for cultural reasons (Mr. Gubler is Swiss) or otherwise, myself and most of the other students at CAI found Jacques a bit inscrutable. To be specific: 1. His advice during the crit was cryptic. (E.g., apparently the word “booth” is so unfortunate that Yishan was advised to find a different word to describe her information booth project. Since Yishan is not a native English speaker, this caused her quite a bit of confusion.) 2. It was quite difficult to have any kind of conversation with him (my attempt on Friday evening failed entirely). And, 3. he generally had the appearance and demeanor of experiencing something entirely different than everyone else in the room. I don’t want to create the impression that Mr. Gubler is unfriendly or anything less than intelligent and well qualified to be part of the program, but we had difficultly connecting with him.

Second, there was a bit of a packing mix up and so Mr. Gubler had his lecture notes for the original lecture (about something entirely different that I have forgotten), but the slides for the Jean Tschumi lecture. So, the presentation was not exactly as planned.

In that context, the lecture was perhaps not our favorite of the series, but nonetheless contained some interesting nuggets of information.

Jean Tschumi was an architect who worked in Europe between the mid-1930s and 1960. The majority of the lecture focused on the Sandoz Labs and some on the Nestle headquarters in Vevey completed just before his death. Check out the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Tschumi” target=”_blank”>Wikipedia page</a> if you want a quick overview, or, if you have more time, apparently Gubler wrote a book on him as well.

Tschumi was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Institute of Urbanism in Paris as well as working for his father, who was a furniture maker. This mixed education is interesting in that it incorporates a wide range of scales of work — from individual pieces of furniture to urban planning. Although it is probably not directly related to his educational background, one of the intriguing things I learned about Jean Tschumi is that he worked at a variety of scales when developing a design. One of his early teachers would encourage drawing very small sketches to capture the intensity of thought that the smaller size allows. Conversely, once working on the details, Tschumi would often work at full scale (1:1) drafting or modeling details in the size that they would ultimately be created in. This method of working seems like it would yield better results than working at a single scale and I’m looking forward to trying the approach next year on my thesis.

The other intriuging aspect of Tschumi’s work that we saw in the presentation was the use of variants to explore different possibilities for a design. Here again, I think richer designs will develop if multiple variations on a single design approach can be explored. Of course, it requires more time to create two or three variations, but when possible, I think the extra work might be worth it.

Finally, Tschumi’s renderings were beautiful. I know very little about him, but if I get a chance I’d like to study his drawings a bit more because they were impressive.