NATUROIDS

ADS1.11/12 : Roberto Bottazzi + Alex Haw

Though man has become the dominant species in every region where the city has taken hold, partly because of the knowledge and the system of public controls over both man and nature he exercises there, he has yet to safeguard that position by acknowledging his sustained and inescapable dependence upon all his biological partners. We have at least a hint of the future task of urbanization: the re-establishment, in a more complex unity, with a full use of the resources of modern science and techniques, of the ecological balance that originally prevailed between city and country in the primitive stages of urbanization. (Lewis Mumford)

INTRO

The air is awash with the cry for change. It is clear we need to transition from our current mode of cosy consumerist living, yet is is unclear how we will start to redesign our cities. We lack coherent, seductive visions radical enough to offer serious change. Cities grew out of agriculture; we tamed the lands and then tamed ourselves, growing and harvesting civilisation. Yet our cities are now almost utterly, amnesiacally disconnected from their lifelines and vital fuels. We fill our bodies with stuff from the very opposite corners of the world - our winter fuelled by their summer. We generally have no idea where our food comes from - and we all know it will probably have to move much closer. This studio offers a year-long investigation into the nexus of this contradiction, committed to both densification and relocalisation, urbanisation and transition. We will study the ways we can reintegrate a culture of food - at every stage from production to collaborative consumption - into all the spaces of our cities. As man becomes cyborg and the blurry line between nature and artifice fades faster and faster, students will investigate and design a series of new artificial landscapes for the future - spaces that converge visionary utopianism with knowingness, plausible implementability with creative invention, the analogue with the digital and the man-made with the natural. In an age where we use too much countryside yet have too little city, we need to radically adapt. We will crossfertilise two types that are traditionally polar opposites - the horizontal farm and the vertical housing estate. Together we will explore new fertile vertical terrains and infrastructures for both humans and the broader environment. We will examine the collision between the landscape and the city, our bodies and our environment - how we farm and sell and shop and cook and meet and eat and more - exploiting the architectural opportunities at every stage to rethink and redesign these spatial relationships, and thus to rethink the city. Our site is the near future. We seek explosive imagination fuelled by rigour and clear provocations on the almostpossible - convincing and alluring alternatives to the banality and mediocrity of much environmental thinking. Through a series of briefs that probe both the nano and macro, students will be asked to develop an attitude and individual course of action; to define their own research, and refine their response. You are urged to fight, to push, to struggle for your beliefs. Make stuff that matters.

SUMMARIES OF BRIEFS

BOOK Everyone will be asked to research and visually document a food type, a spatial technology (varying from nano to global) and an architectural precedent. The studio will openly collaborate on the collective production of our operating manual for the year combining the accrued intelligence and knowledge within a beautiful, useful document whose bounties will remain open for all to access and probe throughout the year.

TOWER At the earliest possible moment, you will be asked to activate your research, and to be propositional. You will design a 100-metre vertical tower that combines and stacks urban agriculture with a programme of your choice whether living, office, public space or something more radical. It must involve some public interaction with crops. The project will essentially reconcile the architectural exigencies of aggregation and circulation with the agricultural search for Its logics and ingredients will be derived from, and rethink, core key aspect of your chosen research, its forms derived from exacting yet exuberant analysis of the available resources, conditions and opportunities.

SPATIAL SCENARIO The end of the term will be reserved for implementing your research and obsessions at a more local scale, spatialising your project at the scale of the body, its space, and its food. You will sculpt a complete space at a zoomed-in point on your earlier tower, mediating internal occupancy with the external elements, confronting the human body with the beauty of its fuel. You will be asked to visualise and prototype the way the space unfolds over time clarifying atmosphere & experience.

PHYSICAL PROTOTYPE Finally, on the last step on our rapid journey through the scales, you will develop a detail that embodies the project youre exploring at a buildable scale - and you will build it. The prototype will be experimental, preliminary and probably digital (whether operationally or constructionally) but will be faithful and representative of the ideas you are pursuing.

Each of these scales will continue to be resolved throughout the year. You will be encouraged to master them all, but supported in a more detailed pursuit of one in particular. The more YOU you get, the better.