A4006 Advanced Studio VI (Multi-Media)
INSTRUCTOR: TestaSPECTRAL ARCHITECTURE: FRESH KILLS
Fresh Kills Staten Island, the largest artificial landscape in the United States, provides a laboratory to investigate the grounds of an architecture after nature. The artificial and natural are interpreted as continuous processes rather than Cartesian opposites. Allying the conceptual to robust functionality, the studio will propose visionary architectural hypotheses that establish relational structures at the territorial scale as well as the quantum development of discrete material assemblies in response to specific individual needs. The studio will explore how to mix the science of the fundamental with the science of the complex to articulate new spatial concepts and aggregations of sensation.
FRESH KILLS
A landscape in constant transformation, not so much a place as a phenomenon or collection of processes, this zone incorporates the mechanics of landfill, including docking facilities, barges, unloading stations, garages, processing plants, and participates in a vast technological terrain with the Con Edison power plant, and the New York Port Authority Teleport, the most important satellite downlink station in the metropolitan region and origination point of a new fiber optic network. Fresh Kills is only one element in the metropolitan network of the New York sanitation department.
Within this inarticulate infrastructure of adjacent processes, self-contained domains, and tidal basins, the Fresh Kills studio will probe for connections and monitor the transformative potential of this anticipatory landscape. Acknowledging the unbuildable nature of an unstable ground building assemblies must burrow, float and hover as artificial climates. Distant from the ground and in proximity to processes, this spectral architecture is at once present and absent, materializing the gap between human beings and nature within human beings. The suspension of ground confirms the need for architecture to develop new relativistic and relational spatial concepts for which preliminary concepts may be found in modern architecture ( espace indicible: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and more recently, Alvaro Siza) vectors of topological and durational spatial concepts.
POST-MEDIA ARCHITECTURE
The intention of the studio is to think in broadly significant and original ways while staying close to nature to establish terms for a post-media architecture, simultaneously but not necessarily coevally sign and matter. In formulating architectural research programs and seeking to give material dimensions to ideas the studio will concentrate on the following questions:
- What is the true ground condition for architecture in a time that makes problematic the specifics of place?
- What architectural processes are capable of constructing new interfaces between mind and nature, between artificial and natural processes, the archaic and electronic, the geological time matter and the synaptic speed of mental thought?
- What are the techniques of an architecture that inverts traditional hierarchies of the sensible and
intelligible, the organic and assembled?
METHODOLOGY
The studio will operate at both a collective and individual level. A research seminar component will run parallel to design work supplemented with field trips. Computers will serve in conjunction with other investigative tools to explore possible applications of software and hardware to develop catalytic processes, to simulate temporal transformation and evolutionary hypotheses. The computers will also be sued in research programs during the early stages of the studio to develop interactive memorandums, a series of speculative propositions relative to characteristics of Fresh Kills, its speeds and modes.
PROGRAMMING
A Climatology Institute (to deal with climates and their phenomena) is proposed as a catalytic program, in cooperation with the National Weather Service, taking advantage of the Teleport satellite downlink and fiber optic network (connected to an increasing array of declassified satellites and data ban ks) as well as equidistance of Fresh Kills to Kennedy and Newark airports. Additional or alternative programs are open to development including interventions anywhere within these networks, a global approach to Fresh Kills, pro specific developments at a s mall scale. It is anticipated that the format is inclusive of divergent interests and design research, and open to spontaneous collaboration.