NEW ORDER

We are interested in the lives of buildings and the stories they contain. Our
studio is established to allow a deep inhabitation of the work you are
proposing, and the social knowledge of being an architect.

In the abiding spirit of the Accademia we are interested in what constitutes a

territory today. Any site has its interconnection with processes, places, and
social structures in the world. We equally undertand the territory of the
archtiect - their histories, facinations and ethical imperitives. We site our
studio in the intersection of these two territories. Our educational project is
based on using our brief to act as an armature to allow each student identify
and re ne their intution, judgment and skillset. So we will locate our design
projects in the territory of the school and of our imagination.

The physical territory will be de ned by water, its ow, its levels and its
demands. Starting with a tap running in Mendrisio we will nd our sites in the
places this water comes from, or where it goes. This site nding exercise will
be augmented by setting great works of ction as a mental site to develop
ideas, understandings and depth of encounter. By inhabiting these books we
will nd clients, explore contexts, negotiate climates and the vastly di ering
rituals and social hierarchies of our world. We have selected books that allow
us to engage with and understand diverse places, climates and socio political
histories. We do this as we agree with Alvaro Siza when he says that
architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality.

The evolution of both a universal and personal architectural language is

rooted in these transformations and translations from one time or culture to
another and from the individual author to the collective conscious.

There is a great need for an architects ability to read and translate. Climate
change means historic forms of building, vernacular intelligences, gain new
value in their translation from one context to another as the weather shifts
and our geography is remade. For us this starts with an ability to read beyond
our habitual understandings and develop a tectonic language that speaks of
this new order.

Atelier Clancy Moore - Winter 2024

USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio
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NEW ORDER
PRACTICAL INFORMAITON

We are running our studio as an encounter and an expansion of the conversations in our
practice. The tuition will be lead by Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore working in
conversation with our assistants and students. Architecture doesn’t happen in isolation,
and we prioritise the social construction of each proposition as a key part of the learning
experience. We are joined by two incredible assistants - Fanny Noël; and Simone
Turkewitsch who will be a key part of this conversation.

For this reason we ask all students to work in groups of 2 or 3. We know there will be
differing interpretations and lines of enquiry and so the tuition will work to develop skills
and insights into collaborative working. We will hold open, supportive and critical
conversations about how we work, open spaces where nothing is off the table, and there
are no taboos. We recongise the unique frustrations, joys and insecurities of architectural
production and do not ignore them - part of our teaching is to allow students develop their
own tools for navigating doubt. Yesterdays certainties no longer apply in the same way -
and the cultivation of curiosity, care and compassion as part of architecture are essential
to our disiplines relevance.

We do not have an agenda for how you draw, make or share your ideas. We encourage all
modes - analogue and digital. We will be setting final model works to be made in paper
(via the zund, or other technology). We work this way in our office, and enjoy its precision,
economy and recyclability.

Your sites will be found in the novels you read from the assigned list of books, in the
territory of the water catchment of the school a track that runs from the mountains around
Mendriso, through rallies and lakes to the Po, and on to the sea— it can include
infrastructures, sites of pleasure, sites of labour or support. We will guide you to a
selection in the first 3 weeks of the units operation.

Building on this our trip will be to follow the watershed of the school and will take place
from Thursday 10 to Saturday 12 October. We will visit local water bodies and their
attendant architectures - from the Borromean islands and from there to Cremona and
Mantova. More at the end of this brief.

Atelier Clancy Moore - Winter 2024

USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio
 DESIGN PROJECTS - A TERRITORY

We are very supportive of the tradition of this school in understanding territory and will its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides:
be setting the territory of our atelier as being that of a tap running in the Accademia. its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and
Where does this water come from? where does it go. This journey encompasses antarctic: its climatic and commercial signi cance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the
infastructures both modest and grant, spaces for inhabitation, cultivation and more. No dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all
brief is too humble not to be given the dignity of architectural thought. In nding the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its
sympathies with agendas in the novels you read you will develop sites in this curtilage. primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all
One way to think about this territory is in how James Joyce considers a tap in his soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow
novel Ulysses: erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its
weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its
“What did Bloom do at the range? gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular
He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in rami cations in continental lakecontained streams and con uent ocean owing rivers
order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it ow. with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial
courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents,
Did it ow? eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts,
Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2,400 million whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial
gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of lter mains of single and ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by
double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of #5 per linear yard by way of the rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exempli ed by the hole in the wall at
Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two
Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues:
tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in
street, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply of 12 1/2 million runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing,
gallons the water had fallen below the sill of the over ow weir for which reason the quenching thirst and re, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and
borough surveyor and waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C.E., on the paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength
instructions of the waterworks committee, had prohibited the use of municipal water in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts
for purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of recourse and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal
being had to the importable water of the Grand and Royal canals as in 1893) estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, ice oes: its docility in
particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding their ration of 15 gallons working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks,
per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch meter, had been convicted of a wastage tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, oating and graving
of 20,000 gallons per night by a reading of their meter on the af rmation of the law docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level
agent of the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the detriment of to level: its submarine fauna and ora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not
another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers, solvent, sound. literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human
body: the noxiousness of its ef uvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the owerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”
range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own We ask you to travel in your novels and in the territory of the waters of our school. We
level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in set no limit on your thinking, but ask only you bring a sincerity to the encounter.
the Sundam trench of the Paci c exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its
waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the
independence of its units: the variability of states of sea:

Atelier Clancy Moore - Winter 2024

USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio
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About the Studio

Lecturers:

Andrew Clancy - andrew.clancy@usi.ch

Colm Moore
Clancy Moore Architects - www.clancymoore.com

Assistants:

Fanny Noël - fanny.noel@usi.ch

Director, Cabinet Architects - https://cabinet.archi/en

Simone Turkewitsch - simone.turkewitsch@usi.ch Director, Studio Vacchini -

http://www.studiovacchini.ch/

First Meeting:

20 September 2024 11:001m - Verzasca dam - details will be cirucalted after

selection

Interim Reviews:

7th November

Final Reviews:

19 December

Unit Website:

www.clancymoore.usi.ch

Unit Trip:

Water Infrastructures Lugano / Como / Po 12-14 October

Guest Seminars / Critics

Celine Baumann / Helen Thomas / Jo Tallieu

Atelier Clancy Moore - Winter 2024
USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio
TRIP - A LIKELY ITINERARY

THURSDAY 10th:
Day 1: Mendrisio → Stresa (Borromean Islands) → Cremona SATURDAY 12th : Day 3: Mantova → Mendrisio
- Morning: Departure from Mendrisio for Stresa - Morning: Visit of Mantua
- Departure from Mendrisio by train to Stresa (duration: approx. 2 hours - Exploration of the historical centre of Mantova:
30 minutes). - Ducal Palace
- Arrival in Stresa, a town on the shore of Lake Maggiore, known for its - House of Mantegna
enchanting Borromean Islands. - Walk through the historical centre and along the shores of the lakes
Morning/afternoon: Visit to the Borromean Islands surrounding the city.
- Take a ferry from Stresa to the Borromean Islands (Isola Bella, Isola Afternoon:
Madre and Isola dei Pescatori). - Isola Bella: Visit to the Borromeo Palace - Lunch in Mantova.
and the Italian-style gardens. - Departure by train to Mendrisio (duration: approx. 3 hours 30 minutes
- Isola Madre: Exploration of the botanical gardens. with possible changes).
- Isola dei Pescatori: Walk through the old fishing village and lunch in a
local restaurant.
Afternoon: Departure for Cremona
- Return to Stresa by ferry.
- Departure by train from Stresa to Cremona (duration: approximately 2
hours and 30 minutes). - Arrival in Cremona in the late afternoon and
accommodation in the hotel.
- Evening: Dinner in Cremona

FRIDAY 11th : Day 2: Cremona → Mantova Please note this itinerary may be subject to minor alterations. A
- Morning: Visit to Cremona final timetable will be issued closer to the time.
- Visit to the historical centre of Cremona:
- To be defined. Cremona has a very important violin-making tradition.
- Afternoon: Departure for Mantova
- Lunch in Cremona.
- Departure by train for Mantova (duration: approx. 2 hours). - Arrival in
Mantua and accommodation in a hotel.
- Evening: Dinner in Mantova

Atelier Clancy Moore - Winter 2024

USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio