Brief for the BA Architectural Design studio on scenarios for living after the Anthropocene I lead at the Gerritt Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam - ongoing until June 2020.
The Studio
The Radical Kinship studio will create space for students to identify urgent agendas, develop strategies and invent new forms of architectural practice in order to instrument change. Together we will learn to speculate in a persistent and precise way and to transform those speculations into new realities. We will do this by identifying opportunities in specific contexts and introducing new, wild elements to transform them. The objective of the studio is to explore how we as architects might design for more symbiotic relations between human and non-human agents in the city. This might mean working with landscape or wildlife but could also mean considering technology as a tool, legislation as an object for design, institutions as spaces to be reconfigured and social norms as ripe for challenge. Students will work with narrative as a way of describing new conditions but also test proposals at 1:1 to discover what their impact might be.
The Urgency
Over the past two years, there has been a great public awakening around humanity’s impact on the environment, including the rising popularity of ‘sustainable’ design amongst architects. But this begs the question, what exactly are we sustaining? By focusing on maintenance, sustainability fails to move beyond the status quo, offering, at best, mitigation and management. This studio calls for a new deal to be struck between humanity and our planet; a negotiation between the poles of techno-optimism and an impossible return to primitivism which elevates the role of non-human agents. From the animals in our landscapes to the bacteria in our stomachs to the flora and fauna on which we feed to the Amazon Alexa in our bedrooms, delivery robots in our backyard and Autonomous Vehicles on our roads; the arrival on Artificial Intelligence in our lives reminds us that the category of ‘human’ is an unstable one.
We know that it is already too late to escape the consequences of global warming. Climate collapse will likely completely change the way we live over the next 100 years. To avoid widespread societal collapse, our relationship with the natural world must be re-thought from first principles. A deep adaptation must occur, and this process demands reflection on different forms of life and coexistence, their attendant material cultures, their relationship to ‘growth’ and, ultimately, new ways of relating to our non-human kin. What does it mean to be truly interdependent? In the future, how will we live with non-human life forms? More to the point, how will they live with us? We are in desperate need of alternate narratives of how we will live together in a post-anthropocentric society. Together we will focus on the narrative development in the year 2100, producing a collection of designed interventions and artefacts brought back from speculative future worlds.
