Manifestos

269

Manifesto

Through a manifesto, students explored the core ideas of their projects. The accompanying image is meant to capture the essence of the idea.

Matryoshka Tree House Manifesto

A loose collective beyond simple family associations is given; a core space for intimacy is guaranteed: instead of just a room, like in classic communes, everyone has a micro-house with a bathroom and a cooking plate.

Room drifts apart and nature grows into the hallways, creating microsquares between cell-like living spaces. Individual cells are compacted into a collective space. Public space develops between cells.

The private, the individual, the solitary is the starting condition of the social game and the individual with his or her cells goes looking for other cells, only then forming collectives.

The private would be something that would only occasionally need to be defended, but not something that was primarily created in an aggressive act aimed against a preexisting collective.

Spontaneous Community

While privacy can be guaranteed, community life and activities will happen as often as possible. Common spaces give people chances to have more connection with their neighbors. Residents have autonomy in the management of these common spaces. Many activities come from residents’ initiative. For example, apart from kindergarten and school time, children can play and be took care together within a certain neighborhood area, and their caregivers are also local residents, can be one child’s parents. Spontaneous help between neighbors is important in the community.

Workshops and farms are also managed by the residents. Government will support these public programs, since the workshops have the traditional cultural inheritance function.

A bed is most comfortable when it is free of worry. The bed can be a thin mat on the ground, a grass field, a rock, or a hammock if there is no concern for the disturbance of peace. The bed ultimately is as comfortable as its surroundings. As we continue to propagate over the earth, the surroundings of our beds are becoming worrisome. We continue to expand in all directions, modifying our surroundings with little thought to the consequences of our actions. If we want a comfortable bed to rest, we must adapt to new ways of living.

We must build and expand only in spaces that we already inhabit.

We must embrace living in proximity.

We must ignore the vehicle when we think of growth.

We must re-imagine how we move around a city.

We must not create borders but rather define boundaries.

We must re-evaluate what it means to share.

We must share moments in community.

We must have a metamorphosis of dwelling.

Confronted with the memory of war and the threat of natural disaster, the home must reimagine itself to escape the cyclical story of destruction. While the typical home is both vulnerable to and exacerbates environmental crises, the fortified home both maximizes coastal protection and minimizes human footprint. Domestic living grows softly out of an environmental line of defense, and the home finally abandons the fear of what’s coming next. Instead of receding from the crisis, the fortified home always belongs at the point where the sky, the ocean, and the earth intersect. A series of courtyards, harkening to the traditional housing typology, face the existing villages. They disappear into the landscape while paying tribute to what is already there. The fortified home presents a set of conflicting dualities: It secures the ground yet also belongs to the ground; it densifies living but expands the chances of encounter; it learns from history and rewrites it.

In this community, income and aid are of equal importance; Homes are hacked to be shared with tourists visiting Mayon and evacuees running from Mayon including humans and their livestock. Homeowners are provided opportunities to sell their wares on market streets and to rent out accommodation for visiting tourists. Homeowners are also, however, encouraged together to care for the farming families and their cattle when Mayon threatens danger, provided with hackable space to host and care for those in need. Market streets, farmland, schools, hospitals, cattle shelters, and churches weave together through and across the landscape of Legazpi City. The housing offers protection, shelter, care, exploration, experiences, and community.

Coexisting is not just with Mayon, but with tourists, evacuees, their animals, and each other.

A Manifesto for a Coastal Collective of Daily Rituals

1. This coastal collective community is built upon the individuality and collectivity of daily rituals.

2. The protection of the shoreline and therefore the community depend on the livelihood of the native plants and shrubs.

3. Watering and tending to the vegetation, collecting household waste, and cleaning/maintaining collective spaces are acts of daily rituals that are essential to the livelihood of the community, just as sleeping, bathing, and eating are essential to the individual.

4. Daily rituals and disaster emergency response depend on the same infrastructure. These spaces and resources are shared equally and equitably between all inhabitants.

Wet Collective Manifesto

The idea of sharing daily life is uncomfortable due to the legacy of domestic activites being funneled into hiding (namely the kitchen, the laundry, etc.) thus isolating these actions, away from collective work. This begs the question: what occurs when the family structure is “nontypical” i.e. single youth, single women, elders whose children have grown and left. A housing concept of sharing-gradients, all the while placing activities of the kitchen (and similar) publicly and collectively, with all walkable space as gathering can look like public pockets creating a ‘household’ living room for 6 individuals, a courtyard allows everyone to keep watch over the children, opening your living room to others creates the safest shelter from the elements. This communality bleeds into conventionally individually owned space and allows a second look at the amount of necessary service - less restrooms, less kitchens; for more usage, more people.

This is a collection of different ways to live by having the autonomy to connect further. To end with Donna Haraway, “...all the stories are too big and too small...we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.”

Auxiliary armatures of porosity

This is an absorptive, archipelago of stratified services appended to. Pushing service to a communal scale, creating islands of clusters supported by slivers of service. Community support is apparent as neighborhoods from around wells and kitchens. Life cycle at all stages are extended here, as neighbors support one another, nourish each other, and care for each other. Clusters and cluster aggregation overtime reach a high level of individuality and layers of privacy that begin to get peeled back expose an armature of waste and water collection to protect the community from flooding and water contamination hazards. When it floods, this is the place to be. The ground is ready to hold it all to be used in the future aesthetically and functionally.

shifting gears of service (pre-flood)

Inhabiting uninhabited land comes with great responsibility. Before building this community we asked ourselves why it needed to be built.

How can this place expand the city’s sprawl in a thoughtful way? How can it become a model for future growth? How can our home use Mexico’s natural resources and still respect the land? Can this community encourage us to rethink how we live together?

Here, we address one of our country’s greatest challenges—water. Rather than continuing to transport water from far distances, perpetuating a system of waste, we use water that falls on our own land. We collect rainwater in reservoirs that we care for together. We share what we collect. We always see what we have collected, and we measure its rise and fall.

We form a collective.

By sharing walls and water, we learn to share more of ourselves.

Inhabitable Embankment: A Manifesto

Inhabitable Embankment conceives a proposition for the future of the Sidoarjo mudflow site’s northern edge: a new, compact community that dissolves distinctions between rural and urban, city and countryside, architecture and landscape. In this new town, humanity and nature are rendered inseparable. The garden, which regularly dwells at the ambiguous edge of domesticity – between house and its site – is recentered as both a productive space for the community members’ social and economic gain. At the neighborhood scale, the new town leverages farmland incorporation in its planning to address the economic and developmental realities of the region. It sustains the livelihoods and occupations of local villagers as rice and fish farmers. At the unit scale, the project pays close attention to negotiated boundaries and collectivized services of a shared domesticity. Inhabitable Embankment redefines relations between the site, the garden, and the home.

Post-Industrial Refuge: A Manifesto

The project proposes a city of communities in the abandoned warehouse on the coast of Valparaiso. The city becomes a haven for displaced local communities and for new refugee communities to form and to flourish. The project aims to undomesticate housing and to challenge the ideology of domestic space as privatized and enclosed. Individual space is minimized to just a bed, making the bed the epitome of refuge. All other spaces, kitchens, living rooms, and work spaces are blended into one: a collective street. Domestic labor immediately becomes a shared activity that creates a community with many services to offer its inhabitants, by its inhabitants. The city becomes, not only a self-sufficient organism, but a fruitful one to the benefit of its communities and of Valparaiso at large.

The Irrigating Terraces Manifesto

The resilience of a community resides on its collectivity. The Irrigating houses are a unified entity that shares water resources for collective prosperity. The shared amenities make collective resources transparent and accessible while creating sites of congregation and enabling surveillance. The residents of the Irrigating houses are held accountable for collectively preserving and demanding resources for their community. On a urban scale, this unified entity encompasses a more resilient interface between the urban environment and nature, creating a symbiotic relationship between natural and city growth.