SUPER MODELS by ADS4

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2016

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Nicola Koller Tom Greenall

INTRODUCTION Super Models

STUDENTS

DIEGETIC PROTOTYPES

Alexander Ball Alexander Barretta Samuel Douek Tanya Eskander Claudia Fragoso Andrew Gibbs Iain Jamieson Matteo Mastrandrea Charles Proctor Eryk Ulanowski

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Adrian Lahoud Ciarán O’Brien Fiona Raby Harriet Harriss Iceland James Pockson Jo Dejardin Laura Jouan Mike Lim Nelly Ben Hayoun Nick Beech Owen Watson Peter Silver Rachel Harding Rosy Head Saba Golchehr Tomas Klassnik

STUDENT YEAR 2 Claudia Fragoso Andrew Gibbs Alexander Barretta Eryk Ulanowski Tanya Eskander Samuel Douek Charles Proctor Alexander Ball Matteo Mastrandrea Iain Jamieson

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And special thanks to Ollie Alsop & Squint/Opera ads4.co @ads4_rca (twitter)

Show kindly supported by Karakusevic Carson Architects. CREDITS Great effort was taken to identify the rights to all images published in this catalogue. Any errors are unintentional and will be corrected in later editions as soon as the designer has been made aware of the correct source. COLOPHON Publication commissioned by the Architecture Department, Royal College of Art, London. Project supervised by Dr Adrian Lahoud, Dean—School of Architecture, and Rosy Head, Senior Tutor. Project initiated by Matteo Mastrandrea, second year student from ADS4. The publication will be available during the exhibition, RCA SHOW 2016, Kensington site. Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU, UK Further information, please contact: school-of-architecture@rca.ac.uk Editing and proofreading of each folio, ADS Tutors and Rosy Head, Senior Tutor. Graphic Design and Art Direction, Laura Jouan—laurajouan.fr Printing, ArtQuarter Press. Many thanks to Ben Craze, Art Quarter Press, for helping on the project and making it possible. Project, seven folios representing the seven ADS from the year 2015-16. First edition, 250 copies, digital production on Cylcus paper 80gsm. Produced in June 2016. Printed in United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-78280-850-3

In June 2016—the same month that the current cohort of ADS4 students graduate from the RCA—a video game will be released under the title No Man’s Sky. In the game, randomly placed astronauts, isolated from one another by millions of light years, must find their own existential purpose as they traverse a galaxy of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets.1 Every particle in the universe is accounted for: the precise shape and position of every blade of grass on every planet has been calculated; every raindrop has been numbered, and each animal has a unique behavioural profile (they have friends and best friends too), explained the chief designer, Sean Murray, to The Atlantic in an interview in February 2016.2 Murray and a group of programmers designed this vast digital cosmos in a studio half an hour south of London. Or rather, through the science of procedural generation,3 they designed a program that allows a model universe to create itself. What sets No Man’s Sky apart from other games is that the physics haven’t been faked. In other games, when you’re on a planet, you’re surrounded by a ‘skybox’—a cube that someone has painted stars or clouds onto. The skybox is also a barrier beyond which the player can never pass, the limit of the digital world. In No Man’s Sky, however, every star is a place that you can go. Day turns to night not because the game is programmed to transition between different skyboxes but because the planet is rotating around a sun. When they decided they wanted green skies, the team had to redesign the periodic table to create atmospheric particles that would diffract light at just the right wavelength. The physics are ‘real’ and the model is potentially infinite. It turns out that the laws of nature needed to create an entire model cosmos can be written in just 600,000 lines of source code. In one sense, because of the procedural design, the entire universe exists at the moment of its creation. In another sense, because the game only renders a player’s immediate surroundings, nothing exists unless there is a human there to witness it. Like our own world, this simulated universe is bounded only by our ability to experience it. At the heart of the history of the computer, there has always been the dream that one day it would be possible to mathematically simulate the physical world well enough to generate graphics which, to our eyes, would be indistinguishable from the real world. As we approach the fulfillment of this techno-evolutionary dream, it is difficult not to wonder: What if we are in fact living in a computer simulation? The proposition that the universe is actually a computer simulation was first considered seriously back in the 1970s, when John Conway famously proved that if you take a binary system, and subject that system to only a few rules, then that system creates something rather peculiar. What Conway’s rules produced were emergent complexities so sophisticated that they seemed to resemble the behaviors of life itself. He named his demonstration The Game of Life, and it helped lay the foundation for the Simulation Argument4 and its counterpart the Simulation Hypothesis.5 These fields have gone on to create a massive multidecade long discourse in science, philosophy, and popular culture around the idea that it actually makes logical, mathematical sense that our universe is indeed a computer simulation. Regardless of whether the Simulation Argument is to be believed (and if it is, then whether it should affect our behavior), the world we live in can be thought of as a model. Or, at the very least, as being controlled by models—political models, economical models,

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mathematical models, theoretical models, business models... From early computer simulations performed as part of the Manhattan Project6 to the significance of climate modeling for political processes, we are basing our decisions on a series of numerical models. As such, the world itself can be considered a sort of super model. This is a condition created by humans, but only partly controlled by them. As the real and the virtual, the seen and the unseen, begin to merge, we must take a candid look at the technologies that are transforming the concrete reality of social civilisation into abstractions—figures, algorithms, financial speculations—leading to the accumulation of nothing. Only through striving to understand and adapt the model can we be more than merely supporting actors playing out simulations of real life.7 It was on this premise that ADS4 started the year with the idea of the ‘model’: the conceptual bridge between the virtual and the real. We investigated what models mean for architecture and urbanism, their present use and future consequence. We also formed our own definition of the model to help distinguish between prescriptive models and descriptive ones. From scale models and representational ones, to the social models that form the context for our lives, we explored the possibility that we might one day fabricate—for better or worse— a new model for reality. “To make a model”, wrote O.M. Ungers in 1982, “means to find coherence in a given relationship of certain combinations and fixed dispositions. This is usually done with two types of model: visual models and thinking models”.8 For Ungers, by means of these two model types we can formulate an objective structure that turns facts into something more certain and therefore more real. The model is an intellectual structure setting targets for our creative activities—in a similar way to how the design of model-buildings, model-cities, modelcommunities, and other model conditions are supposedly setting directions for subsequent actions. The pursuit of new and alternative models seemed particularly pertinent this year: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles; Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content; and Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Social media and the sharing economy are transforming models of business, open-source platforms and the nascent ‘maker movement’ are challenging modes of production, and the referendum on Europe is already disrupting our model of politics. Through our investigations we set out to identify our own individual models of thought, theory and practice. From Model to Reality Around 1989, television images “started walking through screens, right into reality”, suggests filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl.9 Data, sounds, images and now BIM models are routinely transitioning beyond the screen into a different state of matter. Theorist Benjamin Bratton discerns that, “contemporary [digital] platforms are now displacing, if not also replacing, traditional core functions of states, and demonstrating, for both good and ill, new spatial and temporal models of politics and publics”.10 Within architecture, models have become unplugged and unhinged, and have started occupying off-screen space. But by becoming real, most models are subsequently altered, compromised or ‘value engineered’. SketchUp models masquerade as real cities;

‘Spam Modernism’ proliferates indiscriminately. In some senses, the realised building is just another representation of a preceding model at a different scale; the final building is not necessarily the ultimate embodiment of the idea. Thanks to new forms of production and fabrication, the transition between digital visualisation and physical manifestation has never been easier. In the words of Steyerl, “an upload can come down as a shitstorm.”12 For ADS4, this gap between the model and reality became our site of investigation. The map, to use a well-known fable by Borges, has not only become equal to the world, but far excels it.13 The planet has now been so extensively surveyed that the map has become a model— a three-dimensional simulation of reality. We have, therefore, tested the possibilities of the city-as-model. Under these mutable conditions, production morphs into postproduction, meaning that the model city can not only be understood but also altered by its tools.14 The tools of postproduction and 3D-modelling—editing, filtering, cutting, mirroring, make-2D, and so on—are not aimed at achieving representation: they have become the means of creation, not only of models, but also of the world in their wake. As we began to inhabit the gaps and glitches in the model, we found ourselves able to imagine designs for new and highly specific communities some time in the near future. 11

Critical Design & World Building As designers, we have the ability to extrapolate and project knowledge in order to imagine new worlds for others to inhabit—to imagine new and alternative models for living. As advocates of Critical Design (a form of design practice developed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby15), ADS4 uses speculative design proposals to explore and interrogate these worlds. By Critical Design we mean design that poses questions rather than just attempts to provide solutions to problems. The critical questions that we pose often create new worlds upon their asking. Using strategies and techniques developed by other disciplines, we build these worlds. We think that one of the most important and influential roles we have as critical designers is to talk about complex and difficult ideas, to generate debate and to challenge current preconceptions about the role that design can play in everyday life. This is what our new worlds allow us to do. By making possible futures seem familiar we hope to allow our audiences to decide for themselves what a preferable future would be. According to Steyerl, “one cannot understand reality without understanding cinema, photography, 3D modeling, animation, or other forms of moving or still image”.16 She believes that reality itself is postproduced and scripted and that, “far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm”, images, models and the real world are, in many cases, just versions of each other. To help us to build these worlds, ADS4 spent the year collaborating with Squint/Opera, a creative agency that produces films and animations, visualisations and exhibition material. Together we experimented with film genres and narratives as an instrument for both research and design, as well as a tool for representation and communication. This collaboration allowed us to explore the use of fiction in the production of the world around us. More importantly, the film scripts that resulted helped us to understand and manage the (sometimes uncomfortable) contingent possibilities of action, thus challenging us with the awkward tension between the intention of the designer and an unpredictable social realm. For us, this

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is the essence of Critical Design. According to Dunne & Raby, “The viewer should experience a dilemma, is it serious or not? Real or not? For Critical Design to be successful they need to make up their own mind.”17 Embracing the freedom offered by their final year thesis project, many in ADS4 have challenged the expected outcome of a student project, choosing to begin investigations that will form the foundations for their future careers rather than conclude their student portfolio. Through investigations into models of language, citizenship, sovereignty, generational models, predictive models and distribution models, we see architectural projects emerge that speak critically on issues such as: the housing crisis (Iain Jamieson), automation of labour (Claudia Fragoso), Brexit (Alexander Barretta), material scarcity (Charles Proctor), digital sovereignty (Andrew Gibbs), gentrificiation (Eryk Ulanowski), marginalisation (Samuel Douek), technological hyperstition (Tanya Eskander), image culture (Alexander Ball) and even the extinction of language (Matteo Mastrandrea). Through our approach, we hope to nurture and encourage designers to find creative ways to insert themselves into areas where architects are not typically found. Nicola Koller, Tom Greenall

1. Morin, Roc (2016). ‘Inside the Infinite Universe that Creates Itself’, The Atlantic [Online] Available at: http:// www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/ 2. Ibid. 3. In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually. In computer graphics it is commonly used for creating textures. In video games it is used for creating large amounts of content in a game. Advantages of procedural generation include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay (Wikipedia). 4. The Simulation Argument was developed by Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. The original paper presenting the Simulation Argument: ‘Are you living in a computer Simulation?’ Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 2003, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255. See http://www.simulation-argument.com 5. The simulation hypothesis contends that reality is in fact a simulation (most likely a computer simulation), of which we, the simulants, are totally unaware. Some versions rely on the development of simulated reality, a fictional technology. The hypothesis has been a central plot device of many science fiction stories and films. (Wikipedia) 6. The Manhattan Project was a research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons during World War II. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project 7. In his essay “The Black Stack” (2015),Benjamin Bratton suggests that one of the integral accidents of our current relationship with technology might be that our design career shifts from being the authors of the Anthropocene to the role of supporting actors in the arrival of the Post-Anthropocene. [E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015.] The use of the term ‘actor’ is also intended as a reference to Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which evolved from the work of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. 8. Ungers, O.M. Morphologie/City Metaphors, 1982. 9. Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead”, included in the E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015. 10. Benjamin Bratton, “The Black Stack”, E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015. 11. ‘Spam Modernism’ is the title of Marc Valli’s editorial in Elephant Magazine, issue 23, entitled “What is Post-Internet Art?”, which discusses the impact of digital communication on the production of contemporary art. 12. Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead”, included in the E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015. 13. As referenced by Hito Steyerl in Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead, 2015. 14. A reinterpretation of Hito Steryerl’s attitude towards the increasing postproduction of images and vis-à-vis the world. 15. Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby (Dunne & Raby) use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. www.dunneandraby. co.uk 16. Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead”, included in the E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015. 17. Dunne & Raby, Critical Design FAQ: http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/ content/bydandr/13/0

Emerging Technologies and New Design Methodologies The use of Diegetic Prototypes by ADS4 The advent of digital communication and the web has been the cultural equivalent of an epistemological break. In today’s technologically driven society, design starts at the level of the atom or the gene. Virtual realities, nanotechnology and synthetic biology make us fluctuate between the seen and the unseen, increasingly influencing our aesthetics and providing new instruction kits for reality. This is gradually, but noticeably, affecting both the design and production of buildings, as well as the critical evaluation of architecture. Consequently, new tools are required to help architects investigate and communicate the potential of emerging technologies on the built environment. ADS4 specialise in the use of one such tool: Diegetic Prototyping— an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling. Coined by David A. Kirby, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, the term ‘diegetic prototype’ refers to cinematic depictions of future technologies. In the fictional world—what film scholars refer to as the diegesis—these technologies exist as ‘real’ objects that function properly and that people actually use, endowing the technology verisimilitude. Through the use of diegetic prototypes, filmmakers have been credited with demonstrating to large audiences the utility, harmlessness and viability of a nascent technology. The prototype is a useful tool for suspending disbelief in change, and communicating some of the subtle changes in human values that might occur as a result of emerging technologies. Through the use of diegetic prototyping in architecture, ADS4 intends to lend plausibility to possible future scenarios and provide a tangible way for our audiences to engage in debates about the future. The diegetic prototypes shown here have been developed by this year’s cohort of ADS4 students, both first and second years, and were first exhibited at the RCA Work in Progress Show in February 2016. They can be understood as future products which, amongst other things, investigate the implications of: language extinction, social media addiction, digital immortality, vehicular automation, a ‘tech bottleneck’ as a result of a shortage of rare earth metals, simulation singularity and the devolution of the UK.

DIEGETIC PROTOTYPES 1. BIM City: A low res architecture for a simulated city, Carolyn Kirschner. 2. Personal Metal Stockpile: A year’s worth of endangered elements critical for my technological needs, Charles Proctor. 3. Passport of Nowhere, Andrew Gibbs. 4. Barclaylarp Shield: Shield for Corporate LARP (Live Action Role-Playing), Iain Jamieson. 5. Immortal Monkey: Personal Data Storage Device / Immortal Avatar, Isabel Ogden. 6. ‘I miss the spinning wheel of death’: Analogue spinning wheels for times of technological scarcity, Tanya Eskander.

Welcome to the Life Automatic: a new type of service station that tends to an increasingly mobile society. As all forms of transport—public, private, logistical—become fully automated and driverless, the UK’s motorways experience a surge in occupation, as the interior of a car becomes a space to live in and sleep in, as well as to travel in. The Mouse, Cat, Elephant and Tortoise are new types of vehicles that promote particular lifestyles within this new nomadic culture. As they settle, their parking becomes more like mooring, and their constantly readjusting configuration become the parking strategy that revolves around the new cultural centres. The service station, therefore, emerges as an evolved typology that holds similarities to that of a new town structure and its residential surroundings. The architecture celebrates a navigational culture that is no longer relevant to the driverless present. The twin condition of the service station, a characteristic reminiscent of the typology’s foundations, invites the potential for two different societies developing in tandem.

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CAPTION 1. Motorway construction reimagined as a formalised aesthetic. 2. The M40 Junction 1A Academy road observation space. 3. Human navigation resembles a no longer relevant vehicle-driving culture. 4. The M40 Junction 1A Academy play area teaching children a new navigational etiquette. 5. One Model, Two Contexts. 6. Welcome to the Life Automatic. ADS4

Claudia Fragoso

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claudia.fragoso@network.rca.ac.uk

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The nation state is withering towards its point zero1. Greater interconnectedness between people and places is bringing about seismic shifts, from the overarching political order to the communities in which we aggregate. Consequently, a plurality of identities is emerging that are no longer predicated on geographical proximity. With the dissolution of nations, citizenship is reconciled as an affiliation to a multitude of political domains and interest tribes. Stacked, these constitute a citizen identity unique from all others; subject to constant redefinition and in perpetual flux: your citizenship is a daily referendum and is up for grabs. Without borders, the social and cultural landscape fragments into a patchwork of domains of increasingly complex hybridity and isolated self-interest; all with a parity to trade in order to survive. As loci of political sovereignty shrink increasingly into a dense tapestry of city-states and county principalities, corporate, institutional and even prominent individual identities, uniqueness is militarised for territorial presence: an urbanism derived from immediate borderlands, distinct typological uniqueness and proximity to a world maintained for your immediate pleasure. The scenario is explored through two facets: the first, a sister campus to UCLA in Weston-super-Mare, derived from the repetitive constellation of spatial typologies inferred through American high school cinema, in which the exchanging of stereotypes generates potential for the invention of new archetypes.The second; a toy gun factory on the Grand Pier, also Weston-super-Mare, exploits a loophole that facilitates the manufacture of real-looking fakes. FOOTNOTE

1. Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism: Theory, Culture and Society, (London: SAGE, 1995) p135

The First Citizen of Nowhere STUDENT Folio4

CAPTION 1. Football field, UCLA campus, Weston-super-Mare. From the series Misrepresentations. 2. Parking Lot, UCLA campus, Weston-super-Mare. From the series Misrepresentations. 3. Gatehouse, Weston-super-Mare. From the series Enclaves and Gated Communities. ADS4

Andrew Gibbs

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andrew.gibbs@network.rca.ac.uk

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“Every day, in every way, Great Britain lives up to its name. And I know this: we can make it greater still. A Greater Britain. Where people have greater hope, greater chances, greater security. I really believe we’re on the brink of something special in our country […] A Greater Britain—that is our goal” David Cameron, British Prime Minister, 2015 Following years of arduous Brexit negotiations, The United Kingdom as we have always known it has ceased to exist. A new era of political neo-feudalism has begun. Nations of an Un-United Kingdom have no future as a sovereign collective, nor as part of Europe. Trans-national squabbling amidst a messy break-up has triggered the independences of Kernow and Scotland resulting in what the media has coined the ‘Great British Break-Off’, exposing raw geo-political relationships across the archipelago. In pursuit of a Greater Britain, The Island Games has been collectively introduced to mitigate the future of political apathy by exploring the potential for national sport (Fugby) to dictate a new mode of cultural diplomacy. Compounded by governmental fears of international inadequacy, the panoptic programme attempts to harness fierce auld rivalries as a new source of cultural soft power, and as a synthetic antidote to the loss of the public identities. The Island (The Isle of Man) has become the archipelagos de facto host, holding The Island Games at the summit of Snaefell Mountain whose established psycho-geographical importance is regarded as a crucial ‘all man’s land’ representing neither mainland, nor a completely foreign territory. Through the familiar lens of national sports, the hexagonal pitch has become a simplified cultural analogy for the islands convoluted geo-politics. The spectacle purports to deconstruct the confrontational nature of conventional sporting rivalry, by encouraging diplomatic deceit, cooperation, violence & betrayal.

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CAPTION 1. National Fugby Stand of Lesser Britain, Centre Spot Elevation. 2. View from a helicopter approaching The Summit on a match day referendum. 3. Combined National Fugby Stands of Jersey, Guernsey & The Isle of Man, Centre Spot Elevation. 4. National Fugby Stand of Kernow, Centre Spot Elevation. ADS4

Alex Barretta

Super Models

alexander.barretta@network.rca.ac.uk

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If a place can be described as relational, historical, or concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place... Marc Auge Throughout time cartography has allowed for the existence, through mapping, of non-place. From the mythical beasts of the Mappa Mundi, to the gold-rich Mountains of Kong. The power of these mapped non-places serves, through the romance of Otherness, to remind us of the paradoxes of life. In our risk-averse, hyper-mapped world, we no longer allow for non-place. There is no attempt to make space for the Other. Authentic individuality, social differences, and uncertainty are rejected in favour of certainty and familiarity. If through a deep sense of its unique anthropological place, London’s Soho offers itself as a place for the marginalised, and dis-placed of society; is it a Place, or a Non-Place? Due to local planning initiatives, large scale infrastructure, and high-end housing developments the paradoxical nature of Soho is being gentrified into a landscape of deaf homogeneity. As land value rises, this haven for the displaced and marginalised is disappearing; being replaced with high street shopfronts, landscaped streets, and pedestrianised promenades. Sohotopia questions whether the architectural proposal, and the power of the map, has the ability to bring about a shift in attitudes to promote Otherness.

Can an architecture of blight be used to preserve Soho’s future?

A new brutalist housing development of Sohotopia is being proposed to derail the homogenous gentrification of one of London’s most unique environments. Elevated over Berwick street market, the ‘High Street of Soho’, the scheme will provide 200 social housing units, local shopping, and community facilities over 11 floors. At street level, the proposal acts as a catalyst for new programs to emerge as the boundaries and landscape of Soho are redefined. Roads become landlocked, land value falls, and new developments are abandoned and re-appropriated. Open streetscapes are closed off, traffic is diverted, and the shadow of Sohotopia casts an eclipse, signalling a new dawn for Soho’s future. Soho has a deep history of marginalisation, blight, and severance. In 1825, Regent Street was built as a thoroughfare for the Prince Regent, and to cut off the squalor of Soho’s mean streets from the gentry of Mayfair. In the late 19th Century, Shaftsbury Avenue was built to demolish the slums of China town. Soho became an island, isolated from the rest of London. During the 20th Century, schemes by Geoffrey Jellicoe, and Alison and Peter Smithson, proposed radical new developments for a war-torn Soho, dramatically reshaping its landscape. The schemes were never realised, but they influenced the later social housing developments of Kemp House, and Ingestre Court. During the 1970s, The Soho Society was established by Soho residents giving them consultative status in Westminster planning policy. In 2007, Westminster City Council published the Soho Action Plan—a document outlining proposals to invest in the regeneration of Berwick Street and Broadwick Street, the area which they labeled Soho’s historic ‘high street’, given the high number of A1 and A2 Use Class establishments. The document was supported by the Unitary Development Framework and Soho Conservation Area Audit, and allowed for major development initiatives to take hold in the area introducing large office buildings and high-end residential schemes with little or no affordable housing, thus raising land value and pricing out the local residents. After the controversial closure of Madam Jojo’s in 2014, and the development of the site by Soho Estates, celebrity and local resident Stephen Fry established the Save Soho campaign group with singer Tim Arnold, with the aim of preserving Soho’s theatrical heritage. Now, an Alternative Soho Action Plan is proposed to preserve the future of Soho’s paradox. As the scheme is implemented, there will be a shift in Soho’s programatic and physical landscape. As some cultures of Soho become integrated into society, they will make space for new cultures of Otherness, with a space to exist in the shadow of Sohotopia.

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Eryk Ulanowski

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eryk.ulanowski@network.rca.ac.uk

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The future of space exploration will be driven by economic imperatives rather than scientific research. From 2022, a technological bottleneck results from a shortage of rare earth metals. The demand for these is likely to be met by the advent of celestial mining funded by investment in commercial space exploration. Simultaneously, Corporation EXTRACT funds a UK base, expanding The University of Essex’s Colchester campus (home to the world’s deepest weightlessness training pool) to accommodate future and possible future space technology. The scheme is designed and explored through the eyes of three conflicting characters: The Drivers (Techno-futurists) are tycoons concerned with investment and profit from the commercialisation of space. The Dreamers (Retro-Futurists), comprised of artists and academics, ponder the ethical implications of celestial mining. They postulate mining a face on the moon to engage the public in this ethical debate through lunar land art. The Detectorists (Frugal-futurists), mine their homes, recycling old technology, anxious about the exploitation of extra-terrestrial resources. The architecture uses ‘hyperstition’ to bring verisimilitude to the emerging field of asteroid and moon mining, quelling contemporary public anxiety by physically providing a set which displays the future technology as necessary, plausible and viable, thus ushering the technology into reality. The project is intended to critique our dependence on technology and to highlight the relationship between our digital selves and the geological processes transforming our planet. By exploring celestial mining through the lens of three different demographics, the project intends to bring to the fore the ethical implications of our accelerationist society.

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The Face of the Moon Towards a Hyperstitious Architecture

CAPTION 1. Through The Eyes Of The Drivers. The view here is curated to show the position of The Drivers within the site. The architectural language used to symbolise their position in the scheme displays a sense of elusiveness, corporate power and dominance. 2. All models are made from either etched copper, silver and/or brass with Spray painted Z-Corp. (From left to right) (A)1.250 model of Hyperstitious Shed (B)1.250 model of The Dreamers Observatory (C)1.250 model of The Dreamers Corporate Architecture. 3. Work in Progress Model. Taking inspiration at its base from Colchester’s Roman chariot circus, the model here incorporates elements of sweeping curves and high reaching columns of the gothic indicative of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. By merging these two components the design looks forward to a new industrial Technological Space Age but also looks backwards to the power of the Roman Empire. 4. When The Drivers & The Dreamers Collide. At the heart of the scheme, the design draws upon Colchester’s Roman heritage and the famous monolith from Kubrick’s, A Space Odyssey. The architecture uses civic motifs and the visual power of film to create a sense of common place whilst the monolith marks the future accelerated evolution of humanity as a result of celestial mining. ADS4

Tanya Eskander

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tanya.eskander@network.rca.ac.uk

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tanyaeskander.com

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Never Say Die sought to define and design â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;queer spaceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; immune from the threat of gentrification. This manifested as two polarised endeavours; A live project in which a caravan was appropriated to create a functioning performance and community space, and a speculative masterplan for a commodified queer neighbourhood in Jaywick, Essex. The contradictions of these methodologies revealed the problems that arise when proposing design solution. Therefore, rather than resolving unsustainable spatial interventions, Never Say Die serves as a catalyst for continuing research, advocating for the creation of subversive queer space as a model of governance for wider society.

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CAPTION 1. CAMP-er-VAN queer performance and community space with deployable awning. 2. CAMP-er-VAN performance, Samuel Douek, 21st May 2016. 3. Jaywick Sands Regeneration Masterplan 2040, Aerial view of promenade. ADS4

Samuel Douek

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samuelbdouek@googlemail.com

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samueldouek.com

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“London has the sixth biggesr metropolitan economy in the world, by 2036 we can make it circular!” Boris Johnson, Towards a Circular Economy, 2015

Last year Britain disposed of £1.2Bn worth of metals, the highest per capita of any EU nation. This is amidst claims that mineral scarcity will onset the next mass extinction and that China could monopolise the metal markets. If history were to repeat itself and China enforced a metals embargo, how would the impact of material scarcity affect society and design today? Hyper Urban Metabolism acts as a scenario where the likelihood of a metals shortage affects both the geopolitical shifts and our own personal interactions with the vital metals of our modern age. Rather than it leading to stagnation, sites such as the Royal Albert Docks, London’s newly conceived 3rd Financial District, will grow and flux in tune to the opportunities and scarcities affected by the newly found circular economy. Buildings will act as material banks, a choreography of interlinked, exchangeable components that can be leased, tracked and sold for profiteering purposes. Architecture will become disposable, age will be eradicated and structure a newly found demonstration of affluence. Capitalism feeds from scarcity and whilst our current reaction is to save, metabolise and recycle our mineral wealth, the disposition and instability it can create may question our desire for a more efficient future.

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CAPTION Metal Exchange. Investors.

1. Buildings as Material Banks, Vault Storage. 3. Hyper Urban Metabolism, Construction in Flux.

2. London’s 3rd Financial District, Golden Dragon 4. Products of the Circular Economy, Leasers &

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Charles Proctor

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It has become phenomenally easy to both document and share experience. Snapchat has surpassed Twitter and in the UK Instagram has overtaken Facebook. As a result we are no longer a text-based society but instead one based on image. The ease of production and pressures of maintaining a visible presence on social media (#picoritdidnthappen) means experience is often curated purely to be shared. Politicians have long been aux fait with the power of the image and today is no different. We see carefully choreographed shots of Cameronâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home life in Hello, Corbyn at Glastonbury and of course Trump. The difference today is the sheer amount of content we are producing and consuming. Thousands of images compete for our narrow window of attention and to do so often any meaning of that content is reduced to the bare bones in order for it to be easily understood and consumed. Capitalising on the opportunity afforded by the refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament, Instant Politics envisages a future in which a temporary home for politics has been set up, where new models for politics in a mass media mass consumer society are tested; the buildings themselves essentially acting as a backdrop for various political moments.

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Alex Ball

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alexander.ball@network.rca.ac.uk

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“…[A] tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5: 17-28)

“If as one people with one language this is the beginning of what they can do, then nothing they plan will be impossible for them.” Genesis 11:6-7

Every 14 days a language becomes extinct.

It is estimated that by 2150 only six languages will remain.

Eventually, these six will collapse into one.

But what are the ramifications of our species’ contemporary tropism towards a universal language; how will a concomitant mass linguicide begin to affect society, subjectivity, and everything in between; and what can be done to mitigate the potentially pernicious consequences of such an unprecedented scenario? In order to generate answers to these questions, it is necessary to isolate and interrogate what is unique to (natural) language—what makes language a definite, discrete discipline (or model)—and thus what will be lost if, following linguistic collapse, communication and meaning regress (or migrate) to pre—(or post)—linguistic alternatives.This project conjectures that what sets language apart— what makes it such an important aspect of our (individual and collective) world(s)—is its ability to refer to things that don’t exist. Yet this ability raises a unique and specific set of problems, particularly in relation to the ontological status of nonexistent entities. Indeed, words like Unicorn, Atlantis, Phlogiston and Counter-Earth (known as “empty terms”, because they refer to objects that have no Being) have, since the early twentieth century, engendered fierce debate amongst those considering the nature and logic of natural language(s)—a debate which culminated in Austrian philosopher Alexis Meinong suggesting that, if natural languages are to make (logical, coherent) sense, nonexistent objects must have some sort of Being (Quasisein); they actually do exist, just in another realm of Being—a realm of Being known as Auβersein (or “Meinong’s Jungle”). By transmuting William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity into a set of architectural principles, this project (commissioned by fictional organisation ACRONYM, or the Association for the Conservation and Retention of Obsolete Nonexistent Matter) attempts to do one thing and one thing only—(non-linguistically/indexically) retain reference to things that don’t exist in a world without language. How? By generating a new piece of public infrastructure for a post-literate world— a series of nodes, interventions, or “clearings”, sited on the UTM (co-ordinate system) grid— known as Meinong’s Jungle.

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CAPTION 1. The Unicorn. 2. Aerial. Ambiguity No. 6, Fill It In, Cliffe Graviton Detector. 3. Exterior. Ambiguity No. 7, Contradiction, South Coast Unicorn Landscape. 4. Exterior-Canteen. Ambiguity No. 6, Fill It In, Cliffe Graviton Detector. ADS4

Matteo Mastrandrea

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As the Millennial generation became the dominant portion of the UK workforce, London saw a rise in the ‘gig economy’. Fewer people were tying themselves to a single ‘bullshit job’ but becoming self-employed, grabbing as many ‘gigs’ as they wanted. Partly as a consequence, these millennials were priced out of housing in central London, forced to retreat to the ever-expanding commuter belt. Marriage and then children inevitably followed. This post-millennial generation—nicknamed Gen25 due to their proximity to the M25—is destined to remain on the outskirts of the city due to the proliferation of luxury residential developments for overseas investors swallowing up the centre. As this post-millennial generation approach working age, might the combination of extended commuting times and an increased acknowledgement of the value of ‘productive play’ (building play, explorative play and role-play), lead to the emergence of a new typology of suburban train station? Through extrapolating current trends, this project speculates on the consequences for London’s commuter-belt and imagines the design of nine such commuter stations—one associated with each of central London’s mainline railway stations. The focus becomes King’s Langley Station: a new centre for LAPRing (Live Action Role Playing).

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Iain Jamieson

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iain.jamieson@network.rca.ac.uk

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The following are a collection of abstracts for dissertations by ADS4 students which were awarded a distinction. Each (interestingly, when considered against the brief and work done in the unit this year) attempted to isolate and interrogate a particular model (of thought, behaviour, society…). Alexander Ball iDentity—Our Relationship with Our Selves. In a globalised society one’s identity is not necessarily immediately laid out before them. Part of the process of defining one’s self in today’s world often means utilising the technology available and engaging with social media. The various platforms and technologies on offer afford one the opportunity to carefully curate, edit and share a desired notion of one’s self. Is this self then truer than any other, or more important as it’s more visible and consumable than the “real” self? This essay begins to look into the role technology plays in defining one’s identity. It looks at phenomena such as the Selfie, posited by many as the ultimate form of self-expression, but in a short space of time has become more about confirming one’s own existence. Flirtations with reality begin to occur when attempting to maintain one’s online self. Social media allows an unprecedented level of access to people’s and in particular celebritie’s “real” lives unheard of even a matter of a couple of years ago.Technology allows the manipulation of image, enabling the aspirational ideals set out by celebrities, whom interestingly whilst finally having control over their image still re-enact certain tropes typically defined by men i.e the Belfie, to be achieved. It also leads to the realms of simulation with content and experience being produced in order to only be shared. Samuel Douek The 1990s Gay Pub: Relic or Resource in post-Recession London? Queer urban theorists have identified that the LGBTQ community’s appropriation of what Amin Ghaziani’ terms ‘Gayborhoods’ is the first stage in an inevitable process of gentrification, ultimately leading to the displacement of the queer culture from an area deemed ‘bohemian’. Such inexorable trends are led by developers seeking to capitalise on the lucrative minority’s influence on rising house prices as marginalised areas transform. In the context of the ADS4 Brief, the cyclical inevitability of gayborhood rise and demise lent itself to the definition of a model, in effect, a formula for gentrification that could theoretically be applied to any urban district exhibiting the ideal characteristics for queer regeneration. Given this academic knowledge, my dissertation revealed that London’s historic gay pubs have always been immune to the threat of this model. Whilst several are located outside of the concentrated nodes of the capital’s gayborhoods, the heritage and community value attributed to gay pubs has ensured their survival through similar closure epidemics in the past. However, since 2008 not only have 25% of London’s LGBTQ venues closed down, but gay pubs have become included in this epidemic of demolition. Increased toleration of homosexuality, the rise in online dating and lease unaffordability are only a handful of considerations that have culminated in this unprecedented urban development, suggesting that traditional gay pubs are no longer required by a community that once valued them so highly. Here, not only the climate of construction but the queer

condition and its relationship with ‘safe’ spaces is evolving. What the dissertation discovered through first hand research, including interviews, my experience as a performer and successive documentaries, is that despite rapid change, spaces that exhibit similar operating principles to gay pubs, including entertainment, diversity, support and heritage, are fundamental to the maintenance of a progressive society in that they challenge systemic hegemony. Therefore, not only can they be regarded as exemplary forms of governance for wider society, but it is of paramount importance that resilient queer space is created and protected. Tanya Eskander The Liminal, The Subliminal and Symbolic: The Resonance of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain with a 21st Century Architect This dissertation analysed three influential models of thought (the liminal, subliminal and symbolic) prominent in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970s surrealist film and how these relate to a 21st century architect and contemporary projects. These models were prevalent not only in the film, but in other art forms and architectural trends from the 1960s and still influencing the choices that architects are making today. These models of thought could be applied to architecture to induce gut reactions, transcending the frontier of consciousness, both individual and collective. The liminal model was defined as a point of connection between two separate areas, just as the threshold is a boundary between the outside and inside and a basic element of primitive vernacular architecture. The liminal was interpreted as defining the line and structure or the essential basis and familiar limits that make us feel securely contained and defined. The subliminal and symbolic are two closely related models which affect the subconscious and are frequently open to interpretation. These models were examined throughout the thesis in relation to Jodorowsky’s film and the sociocultural context of both the 1960s and today. They rely on hyperstition to create models of possible unfamiliar futures involving a utopia or dystopia brought about by technological advancement and concern about mass production and Capitalism. The journey of the dissertation helped to elucidate the extent to which architecture defies strict models of thought and is a fluid, malleable discipline, which can work like a drug, film set or dream to create profound subliminal impact. Strong parallels were drawn between Jodorowsky’s film embodying the sentiment of its time and the architecture of today standing on the cusp of an unknown accelerated future, both as a result of technological innovation. It was seen that these models, the liminal, subliminal and symbolic, could induce a distressing or calming effect and it was evident that they will undoubtedly play a key role in the design of future alien environments, contributing to a sense of belonging or civilisation common to humanity. The thesis, like Jodorowsky’s film, raised far more points of contemplation than answers.

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Andrew Gibbs What is a nation [good for]? : The relevance of nationness to the Postnational paradigm As a schema, nationalisms can be associated to a species of automatic thought that operate on our ability to look at and interpret the world, and interact with it. It is through these abstract systems that we are provided with ways of dealing with complexity; moreover, an unfathomable complexity in which cultural difference renders us with little common overlap to constitute common ground. The largely ill-defined and fuzzy frontier of nationhood… nationness… nationalism… has served as a valuable and elastic repository into which we have been able to pour our culture for safe keeping, accommodating the signs and symbols that have served in the manufacture of epistemological and ontological distinctions with respect to distant, or foreign, cultural models. It has served well in the manufacturing of a largely imagined identity, exercising the value of fantasy in the maintenance of organised civilisations. At the heart of the enquiry was an interest in the manufacture of these models of collective consciousness and the contested systems of representation that they rely on for their fecundity, as well as their changing nature; their emerging redundancy as we approach increasingly postmodern systems of organisation, movement and engagement. The thesis developed by taking Leicester as a case study in which the city was assumed to have developed in tandem to the emerging postnational paradigm. Much has been written on cities as vessels for the collective record, but also too on the important role of redundancy, demolition and replacement as cities regenerate and take on new cultural personas. Discussed in tandem to concurrent ideas on the relationship between memory and the formation of coherent national identities, the thesis developed by acknowledging the parallels between these two models—the city and national identity—and that if the latter is approaching a genesis, then the architectural and urban consequence—in particular how cities begin to respond to vastly increasing social and cultural borders—is a given and represents an incipient challenge for design. Matteo Mastrandrea In Praise of Unfulfilled Potential: Scale, Contingency, Clopenness Let us suppose that—instead of past physics having wrongly (or inaccurately) modelled the laws of the cosmos—at some point in the early twentieth century (as a consequence of a ‘chaotic process of lawless transformation’); i. our universe actually (or physically) changed from being Newtonian to becoming Post-Newtonian (or relativistic), ii. this shift was not universal, but occurred only in our local ‘cosmic neighbourhood’. These propositions disregard two fundamental givens of natural science; (i) they suggest that the ‘laws’ of the universe are not laws at all, but are in fact mutable; (ii) they further contend that these ‘non-laws’ are non-uniform and change within different ‘localities’ at any given moment. Consequently, such statements (if taken literally) appear stultifyingly ill-informed; they are useless (it is assumed) as anything

other than meaningless fictions or intellectual follies. To believe that they are potentially factual—to attribute to them a truth value—would be utterly naïve. Doing so seems wantonly to overlook the fact that a world which obeyed no law would be fundamentally chaotic—a place where nothing would remain other than a pure diversity that orders nothing, a pure manifold without cohesion or development, without consciousness or consistency; a world too capricious even to allow for a scientific theory (whatever it may be) to be applied to reality. Yet this thesis seeks to establish the plausibility of such a protean world; to claim that this world is indeed our world; and furthermore, to parse the ramifications of such a world-view upon our understanding of art. Such a project risks destroying the very ground upon which art makes its stand, by rendering useless the traditional ways of ‘making meaning’ (‘closed’, ‘open’, ‘ordered’ etc.) available to the artist. Vague awareness of this problematic end-game has meant that the vast majority of contemporary art theorists and practitioners have avoided or eschewed debate concerning the aleatory, or the stochastic. But there is no use in repudiating the ramifications of what might be the case (ontologically) solely because of the cephalalgia or fear it provokes. Confronting the very real (if sobering) possibility that we live in a world where all is underpinned by chaos can, for art, be productive, not nihilistic; it can reframe how we consider the ‘complete’ and the ‘failure’; and it can accordingly engender new counter-intuitive modes-of-work that attempt to establish a complicity with contingency. It becomes clear that, if we remove all necessity from the laws of nature it does not require that existence be entirely devoid of order; although, it is undeniable, the world begins to look like a very different place—a place that credits lack of aspiration, values mediocrity, and rewards unfulfilled potential. Charles Proctor Towards a Greater Chaos, Order and Disorder in the manifestation of Dirty Architecture Behind the tangible fabric of our built world, hidden models are dictating our daily lives. They are driven by endlessly pursuing a rationale for a seemingly disordered world that is based on computational algorithms and efficient working systems. Technology is replacing the fickle Homo sapiens for a more virtuous form of order whereby a balance between order and disorder, lucidity and ambiguity, sterility and dirt are forgotten in favour over clarity. This bias dependent on logic is wholly unnatural and we must remember that evolution, our very own system of selection, integrates mistakes or anomalies for the sake of survival; “Mutation is the ultimate source of variation. Without variation there could be no evolution, without Evolution...” Ronald. A. Fisher, 1951 Models then evolve through the help of serendipity and this quiet polemic does not seek to create a particular model nor strive to disband existing ones. Rather it focuses on the prevalence of Chaos Theory within the realm of architecture and posits an alternative appreciation of disorder through the manner of ‘dirt’ or “matter out of place.” The notion of chaos was always deemed an unwelcome circumstance but post the advent of modern Chaos Theory I wish to equate such an attitude and question: can one elicit nonlinearity within a design, and how? Efficiency should not always be the ultimate motive whilst dirt is quite possibly the most intriguing and valuable asset we have today. The out of place, idiosyncratic and wildly different should be our route of cause and a Dirty Architecture at that.

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Nicola Koller Tom Greenall

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