8 minute read
Studio Statement
Manuel Castells
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STUDIO B | STUDIO A | MACRO MICRO: SANDRA COSTA SANTOS GROUND AND EARTH: ANDY STOANE
HOME NOT HOUSE: YEAR 4 The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how The ideal of home, while universal, exists simultaneously as a deep-rooted individual concept- at many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone once fantasy, memory, and longing- and as a cultural norm. One speaks quite easily of “the have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, American dream home” or the “traditional” Dogon houses in Mali. Embedded within the spaces, ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the between the objects, of all homes are implicit roles for men and women, for individual and com earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. munity, for majority and minority groups within any society. Gwendolyn Wright, 1991 Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1775
What is home? Home is a political ground. Home is an urgency in the context of urbanisation and climate emergency. We can’t address the question of home at the individual level, because understanding home GROUND: YEAR 4 is understanding society. Home life (domesticity) reflects a society’s value system and is subject to social, political and economic pressures; just like the contemporary withdrawal from public life into the home reflects our privatised lifestyles. Therefore, the Studio’s driving question on home (not house) opens a much larger problem about public life: who are we as society? Ever since Gestalt psychology promoted figure to ground relationships in human perception. architects and urbanists have borrowed from this idea to create a schema within which the city could be understood and theorised. The thinking is almost always predicated on an understanding of figure (foreground) as artificial and constructed, and ground (background) as existent and residual. Yet today the definition of any real The problem with re-thinking home is that domesticity develops within the spatial arrangements of the house and its location within a wider urban realm. The house is a powerful instrument for predetermining and enforcing home. As an instrument, it has been successful throughout various housing reforms that valorised certain social relations, collectives and morals. While conservatives have focussed on “ground” in our cities is becoming increasingly moot. From nineteenth century infrastructures and ground consolidations, to massive twentieth century inhabited urban podiums, since the industrial age it could be argued that our preoccupation has been less about developing a means of inhabiting the surface of the earth, and more about escaping it. the privatized family haven, progressive reformers have championed collective space and shared resources. The urban and material qualities of housing are key to its political power: how can housing support new types of collective life? Much of our urban landscape is “artificial”. People live and work high above what was once the single ground; civic, public and commercial facilities exist in elevated artificial interconnected landscapes; shopping malls and other quasi-public spaces connect to transportation hubs, which themselves connect to increasingly MACRO MICRO aims to use the disciplinary tools of architecture to experiment and develop an argument on home (as Morley’s ideology) and the urban (as Lefebvre’s social space). Research by MACRO MICRO students last term revealed overcrowding in Dundee’s Hilltown as the acute consequence of the spatialised networks of transport systems buried deep into the earth and used by millions of people every day. These often exist on the scale of whole districts. In the connectivity of the twenty-first century city, the very idea of figure to ground relationships is becoming questionable. city’s housing crisis and the gentrification of the area. Design proposals within the Unit should explore the intimacy of domesticity and the social relations of public life within the context of Dundee. Drawing on this phenomenon of the contemporary city, the studio will seek to discover and design new urban relationships forged from architecture without ground, or maybe ground without architecture. From Hong Kong to Shanghai to London to Cumbernauld, our research will take us to urban fields near HOUSING THE CITY: YEAR 5 and far where artificial grounds prevail through design and necessity. We will localise the research yield through a major work of design in an alternate Dundee, stretched along the already artificial landscape of its waterfront, and imagined under an agency for architecture in which the design of the city is realigned with Housing (…) offers a place to be, is the principal right that allows private life and therefore social socio-spatial ideas. relations to flourish. Without housing one is not able to function and integrate oneself into social life. Therefore, the right to housing should be seen as paramount. Can these new relationships offer scope for a reconsidered occupation of the city, increasing its compactness Peter King, 2017 and providing new fields for urban propinquity?
More people live and work in the city, resulting in three growing trends: urbanisation, lone living and freelancing. The immediate consequence is an increasing strain on resources, space and dwellers’ wellbeing. At the micro scale, housing speaks of intimacy, safety and care. At the macro scale (neighbourhood, EARTH: YEAR 5 district or city), housing can support new collectives pooling resources, reducing energy consumption and production, water, food production, consumption and waste. However, despite the undeniable relevance of “[I]t is easier to imagine the end of the world than changes in the eco-capitalist order and its inequities” said housing, Peter King (2017) reminds us that the ‘right to housing’ is not a natural idea but a social construct. Fredric Jamieson. It is undeniable that the so called “urban-age”, with its trope of continued economic growth Within this theoretical context, MACRO MICRO experiments with the role of housing in urban and concomitant urbanisation, has consumed hinterlands, commodified the rural, instrumentalised urban–transformation and social justice. Year 5 continues the discussion on Y4 with a focus on the housing rural dialectics, and co-opted practices of sustainability into the end-game of maintaining its hegemonic inequalities that threaten the sustainable development of the city, and asks students to build a critical metanarrative. The entrenched divisions that exist in this system are synonomous with “uneven spatial argument on how to house the urban population. Given that the speculative quality of architecture allows us development” across the planet, which the “trap of localism,” as Neil Brenner calls it, only serves to support. to represent, analyse and visualise large sets of information from various disciplines, this year we will engage in conversation with Dundee City Council to discuss such a complex problem. The studio will consider “the urban” as something decentralised - beyond what urban theorist Stephen Cairns describes as “debilitating city-centricity,” In its analysis we will seek new supraurban design MACRO MICRO will work in the spatial, social and political context of Dundee City and in ideas for the built urban environment, premised on the “urban” as something always imagined on a global partnership with the City Council. We know that the City has a relatively high level of deprivation (38% in scale, but always localised in the realm of somewhere. 2020); but housing inequality is a long-standing historic problem in Dundee. Design proposals on sheltered accommodation should respond (at the macro and micro scale) to the City’s sustainable development. These Can the conceptualisation of a non city-centric planetary urbanisation offer scope for the design of an proposals may consider the lack of social facilities that goes hand in hand with housing deprivation and equitable habitat without expropriation or enforced consensus? segregation.
Illustrations, top to bottom:
Buckminster Fuller, 4D Timelock, 1927. A world map, characteristically for Fuller, developing whole world solutions for housing. Prefabricated towers were to be dropped by Zeppelin and erected in a single day, providing two billion new homes across a fully urbanised world.
Crossrail, London Liverpool Street. 3D model showing structure and space above and below “ground”.
Mapping of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, from Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong. The book presents mappings of non-ground-based, publicly accessible areas of Hong Kong, which the authors consider as “a template for public space within future cities undergoing intense densification (and subject to changing weather).”
Drawings from the book Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress.
The authors describe the first as a “drawing by Angelo Bucci entitled The Thin Layer depicting Earth’s boundary as a shallow zone of approximately 3.5 kilometres that constitutes the inhabitable realm of the planet; what appears as a single line is actually comprised of two lines, the inner and outer circles of the thin layer.”
The next two drawings are described by the authors as “Diagrams of uneven world development; the first is the socalled “Brandt Line” from the 1980 Brandt Report prepared by an independent commission of the World Bank, proposing a new “poverty line” demarcating what was then called the developed “First World” above and the underdeveloped “Third World” below;” the second shows archipelagos of affluence scattered around the globe, disclosing the imbalance of wealth accumulation worldwide, based on the Brookings Institution report Global MetroMonitor 2014. (Leonard Streich, Elena Schütz, Julian Schubert from Something Fantastic, Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, 2019).
