Alter Studio 1: Architectural Construction of Calligraphy书法的建筑语构

Architecture Syntax in Calligraphy was the first Master Class that Atelier Alter's founders taught at the Department of Architecture, Tsinghua University, in spring 2020. Staged online, the eight-week studio used calligraphy's play of black and white to return to the origin of architecture: to rebuild the most essential link between hand and brain, and to read buildings through line and mark, together with the abstract and concrete contexts that shape them.

The brief had three parts. Students first worked in pairs to dissect seven canonical buildings, among them La Tourette, the Barcelona Pavilion, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the Humble Administrator's Garden and Rurikoin, to define what an architectural syntax is. They then studied the structure and dynamics of calligraphy: asymmetrical balance, gravitational shift, time and speed, spatial rhythm, and the multiple readings of one text. Finally each student defined a site beside, inside or at a distance from a chosen classic and designed a Chinese cultural centre of about 2,150 square metres there, in dialogue with the local architecture.

The online format became an opportunity: guest architects from leading schools, including David Gersten, Christoph Hesse, Dongwoo Yim, Yu Morishita and Sylyng Yong, gave lectures and joined the reviews. Twelve students took part. Together with the 2021 Tianjin University instrument studio and the 2022 Tsinghua art studio, it forms the trilogy that Atelier Alter treats as one integrated practice of making and research.