unit-code
This year, starting from an understanding of the Anthropocene environment and post-Anthropocene aspirations, Unit 7 students were asked to re-imagine scenarios, test and implement proposals that explore changes in the current context and lay out a new design vision following the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s concept of the Symbiocene – an era of an increased relationship with and awareness of the environment.
The Anthropocene crisis is understood as not just a geological problem but also as an opportunity for mutualism and co-creation with nature and its phenomena. Symbiocene exploration was applied to sites representing the ruins of modernity, with brownfield lands offering an incredibly fertile resource to re-imagine symbiotic opportunities at different scales in the current ecological theatre. Those anthropised ruins of post-industrial leftovers acted as cathedrals for future manifestations of new ecologies, social engagement and neo-natures.
Students learned phytoremediation and phytomining techniques to remediate sites and repurpose the land. This unearthing resulted in an archaeological and geological act of discovery, bringing looming narratives and interpretations of the past to light. Through these the students gained greater understanding of the stratigraphical context of the existing architecture; they also observed and investigated the anthropogenic mass and its environmental impact.
Unit 7 explores possibilities of integrating architectural gestures in the built environment, rewiring softscape and hardscape as a new ecological compound and blending the boundaries between landscape architecture, architecture, engineering and environment. The unit also explores the dichotomy between mineral and vegetal, human and natural, culture and production. New functions and archetypes are examined: architecture as a pollinator, architecture as a phenological machine and architecture as a multispecies cathedral.
By observing nature as a creator and learning to weave its tapestry in the minerality of leftover sites, students’ final projects integrate environmental and biological artefacts with architectural archetypes. Working on the timeframe of the site as a chronotopy (architecture as the symbiosis of time and space), students re-imagined the timeframe of architecture and its performances, making it an environmental and phenological machine.