LAB-OR :: Design Practice in South Dakota

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Dieste Journal is a collection of student work from the 2020 Eladio Dieste Building Shop in the Department of Architecture (DoArch) at South Dakota State University. Dieste Building Shop is a history seminar and hands-on construction technology class about the labor conditions of Dieste’s structural innovations in Cerámica Armada.

In Spring 2020, three teams of five students set out to build three, large-scale (1:20), physical models of the Encofrados (formwork) used to construct the Gaussian Vaults of three structures designed by Dieste: a Church, Silo, and Warehouse. The physical models are based on the virtual models (link) constructed by students in 2019 and images from the Dieste and Montañez Archive. In response to COVID-19 pandemic, students made their Dieste Journals the primary site of their work for the reminder of the semester.

01. Church: Iglesia del Cristo Obrero. Atlántida, Uruguay. 1958-60

02. Silo: CADYL Horizontal Silo. Young, Uruguay. 1976-78

03. Warehouse: Depósito Julio Herrera y Obes. 1977-79

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01 Church Team

Andrew Kocer

Brayden Nielsen

"The builder is indispensable. In fact, the project for a building is not really complete if it does not consider how it will be built, and the ways in which a building can be built have a notable power of inspiration."

"What is called simplicity is usually unjustified simplification, and economy usually refers to money and its movements -- economy in the financial sense. The things that we build must have something the we could call cosmic economy, that is, to be in accord with the profound order of the world."

"Apart from its obvious functions, architecture is an art. If we could know the world in a perfect and infallible way, then we would not make art; we would simply contemplate the world."

02 Silo Team

Brakken Bierl

Samuel Borr

Stephen Kalenberg

Shyanne Kopfmann

Mahmoud Sadek

"It is not enough that be contemplate and resolve functional problems and their spatial expression. We should build architectural spaces, and their expression will be conditioned by how we build them."

"The great problem of industrial and post-industrial society is how to save mankind and even how to save this machine from self-destruction, the same machine that we have built and and that has so many good and fascinating aspects."