Atelier Blumer. Seven Automatic Architectures and other exercises

The book presents a series of installations, conceived and built by Riccardo Blumer’s students at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture. They are a further stage in a distinctive educational process where the fundamental principles of architecture are learned in particular by reflecting on the role of the human body: emphasising its poietic role (the body that builds objects), its scenic potential (the body as a spatial device in motion) and its function as a unit of measurement of the world. The students then identified two areas of investigation to be combined. On the one hand a simple, archetypical architectural theme (door, wall, path, etc.); and on the other, a reflection that investigates physical phenomena and their relation with the body, using electronics, programming, bricolage, etc. The result is a set of installations, which the observer’s body can interact with, and which gives rise to a meditation on the primary themes of architecture.