Course No.: 848126
Teaching: Jade Bailey, Daria Smakthina
Hybrid Futures for a Vanishing Frontier
Brief
True wilderness is hard to come by. For thousands of years, human progress has coincided, not coincidentally, with the relentless transformation of our natural environment. We have and continue to cut, burn, cultivate, and exploit the Earth’s resources at an alarming rate in pursuit of survival, comfort, and advancement. This detrimental cycle has left important ecosystems unable to repair themselves and be forever altered.
The notion of wilderness reaches beyond untouched natural landscapes; it envisages a place where there has been little to no human interference. However, as we continue searching for more commodities, new space for human dwellings, and survivable climates, coupled with the globally encompassing effects of climate change, we start to eradicate the occurrence of true wilderness.
As we rely heavily on our natural landscape for survival, damaging them so irrevocably seems counterintuitive. Especially when the well-being of our planet and those we share it with are inextricably linked with ours. Effectively maintaining, re-cultivating, and expanding areas of true wilderness requires a fundamental shift in how we value and interact with our environment. Boding the question: How can we begin to understand, protect, and restore the delicate balance of life in these environments and re-introduce them into our urban realms through architectural edifices whilst designing for an entangled, human and non-human future?
Through this lens, the studio will explore architecture as a sensory machine that evolves from the characteristics of the selected site. We will investigate how to gather, respond to, and communicate ecological and sensory data through technological apparatus and architectural solutions. Within a conceptual framework, students will reflect on the current context of wilderness and imagine spaces for the present or future scenarios. Embracing experimental and novel approaches to architectural form finding, construction and inhabitation. Developed by experimenting with digital software to establish an alternative architectural design mode that combines high and low-tech techniques to inform sensitive and adaptive concepts to re-imagine and reestablish wilderness through architecture.
Students will work in groups to develop and apply building design strategies focusing on re-imagining and cultivating wilderness. The objective is to design an enclosed space by delving into an interspecies narrative that nurtures a dual agency of architectural and ecological programmes. Students are asked to design small-scale research centres specifically designed to cater for a chosen inter-species interaction, by exploring the principles of temporality, seasonality and inter-species behaviour patterns. Special attention should be paid to how materiality, frequency of inhabitation, and the life span of architectural layers play a role in creating these structures. Embodied with a ‘small is beautiful’ ideology, there should be a craftship to create intricate, sensitive, environmentally adaptive and conscious architectural structures promoting ecosystem resilience.
Presentation <– click here
