Studio Imma
The Design Studio of trimester 2, year 4 is an opportunity for students to develop their ability to research, survey, discover, and understand the value of research through design. It is an opportunity to find ways to push the discipline-specific boundaries and look beyond academia. The studio enables students to engage with a site, a building, a community outside of the university, and to use these as a vehicle for discovery.
The students and teachers of Studio IMMA worked with the curators and administrators, past and present, of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, with people from NCAD, the OPW, academics from other disciplines in UCD and the architectural profession, over a 12-week period of study and proposition. It is presented and recorded here.
The student work is exploratory in nature and gives a degree of licence to imagination in survey and projection. It is provisional and speculatively made in the context of an open studio which invited questions and observation, inducing projection of that which exists or existed, is imagined to exist or imagined to have existed, or can be dreamt as a possibility. The studio’s authority is not always grounded in academic research of an audited nature but in the studious enquiry and rumination of students as a dispersed studio entwined with the place of IMMA , whether from a remote vantage point in time or space or through close encounter on its own grounds this trimester. The students’ work is presented as composite portrait - studies towards a portrayal composed from various students’ perspectives. This is collated from a partially measured and variously imagined survey against a shifting set of backgrounds stories and encounters. The studio was conducted in a spirit of concerted listening and looking, in and out, combined with contingent and subjective mapping and measurement of qualities. The website records perceptions and projections of the position of IMMA from close up and far out. Individual recordings may err, remain incomplete or uncorrected, or create a degree of interference. Reviewers and visitors are invited to read between the tangled lines of drawing and text, embroidering their own view into this tapestry, darning gaps and tensioning threads, to see the place and its potential anew, or at least askew from any official or un-nuanced position.
