Tom Fecht
Info
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Area
School of Design
Role
Visiting Tutor
- Innovation Design Engineering
- [email protected]
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Tom Fecht has been a regular teacher on the IDE programme since 2004, as well as delivering occasional master classes to students on the Architecture, Textile and Vehicle Design programmes. Most recently he has been teaching in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and Rome, and the Academy of Applied Sciences in Berlin-Potsdam.
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Biography
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Tom Fecht was born in Germany in 1952 and has lived and worked in Basel, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany; and Brittany, France. Since completing his studies at Columbia University, New York and Technical University, Berlin Fecht has worked as an engineer, publisher and editor. In 1992 he launched his artistic career at Documenta IX with his European land art project Mémoire Nomade. In the mid-1990s, Fecht embraced photography as his preferred medium and has since produced an extensive body of landscape and portrait work; his work is represented in the National Gallery, Berlin.
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Practice
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Selected work
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Selfportrait, Tom Fecht
Selfportrait, Tom Fecht
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Student study for SUPERFORM workshop
Student study for SUPERFORM workshop
Research
Research interests
Tom Fecht’s current research focuses on projection and photography as a design tool and heuristic toy. This includes innovation strategies for a new type of camera, which fuses the traditional elements of camera obscura with the high performing features of a new generation of scientific image tools.
Upcoming publications inlcude:
Fecht, T., 'Refocusing the Euclidian Horizon' in The Cornell Journal of Architecture #9, NY: Ithaca, 2012 pp 4–9
Academic Projects
Go Global (2005–7) A collaborative study project between the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and IDE/RCA. Tutor and photographer on a series of training modules involving students from both faculties to develop their design skills in a global environment. While the 2005 module focused on designing a series of products for the Chinese market, the 2007 module targeted the negative effects of extreme consumer culture. To develop critical response and long-term design strategies in a global market scheme, the research in China explored a broad spectrum of meta-themes such as Time, Wellbeing, Intimacy, Truth, Scale, Spirituality and Narcissism/Hedonism.
Broken Vision (2004–5) Exploring The Projection of Surface and the Displaced Image. This was an experiment with architecture and art students at Cornell University, co-taught by Fecht, visiting Professor of Photography and John Zissovici, Associate Professor of Architecture . This project included a fieldtrip to Donald Judd's installations in Marfa, Texas and the collaborative design and construction of projection devices for a touring exhibition (Hartell Gallery/Cornell and Royal College of Art).
Metropolitan Transformation (2002–5) An interdisciplinary study series in connection with annual excursions for students of Industrial Design, Architecture, Photography and Media Design at the Academy of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Annual excursions were taken to: Paris (2003) in cooperation with Boston University Paris Internship Program and the Centre Georges Pompidou/Centre de Création Industrielle; London (2004) in cooperation with the RCA, The London Consortium and The West London Architectural Society; New York (2005) in cooperation with Cornell University, SOM, Diller Scofidio Architects, DIA Foundation, photographer Gregory Colbert (Ashes & Snow) and interior designer Dakota Jackson and Lee Mindel.