Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center

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The Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC) was founded in the mid-1980s as an urban branch of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University . The advanced students of the old Land-Grant University in Blacksburg were given the opportunity to escape the tiny university town in rural Virginia to experience architecture and urban planning in the context of teaching. Today the WAAC, which is housed in a former girls' school, is designed as a multinational base for a total of 13 universities in order to cooperate with other architecture departments in a kind of "consortium" across borders.

partner

The German partner university is the Bauhaus University Weimar . This connection symbolizes the institutional bond with the Bauhaus philosophy, which the "Tectonic Designer" Olivio Ferrari, as he describes himself, since the founding of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1960s with the "Foundation Program" (see basic teaching or . Preliminary courses at the Bauhaus) in Virginia.

The cross-connection between the architecture department of "VirginiaTech" and the Bauhaus concept is manifold: on the one hand through the "old" Bauhaus people who emigrated to the USA and a. at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, so to speak in the neighborhood, taught, like Josef Albers and Walter Gropius , on the other hand through the "post-Bauhäusler" like Max Bill , with Olivio Ferrari after his training at the vocational school Solothurn at the college for Design Ulm studied.

Influences

The architecture department and the faculty owe their strong architectural sculptural - experimental - haptic character with Louis I. Kahn , Buckminster Fuller and Antonio Gaudi as great role models to the influence and work of Olivio Ferrari (from 1965 to 1994), who was also head of the study abroad program from 1968, and founded the Virginia Tech European Studies Center at Villa Maderni in Riva San Vitale.

After the dissolution of the "old" Bauhaus in the Third Reich and the politically motivated shutdown of the HFG Ulm in 1968, the strongly design-oriented Foundation Program of the architecture department of VPI and SU and the curriculum of the WAAC form a pedagogical fossil that is now in the Ticino and Weimar tried to resolve the contradiction between autonomous art and social compatibility.

ladder

The head of the first "urban branch" in Alexandria just outside Washington DC was J. Thomas Regan, now Texas A&M University . The head of the now permanently established institution is Jaan Hoolt.

Web links