With Erick Carcamo
Casey Rehm TA

The studio proposes, to conduct an extensive research in the cellular logic and construction of structural energy production systems. To radicalize the agenda of the autnomy of form, using the possibilities of kinetic and movement. This research will serve as a base for the design of a veterinary hospital which produces sufficient energy to power the buildings in its immediate area. Students’ design will accommodate the needs of the veterinary hospital but also the design of an energy producing system that can meet or exceed the 4 kWh/square meter daily consumption appetite of the city block. 40% of greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to our buildings. Can that appetite be inverted, from consumption to production?

Our interest is to explore how architecture though extreme formalism can positively contributes to the sustainable energy capacity of a city and its hosted biomass. Instead of focusing on how a building’s own energy appetite can be suppressed or limited, we consider how its local circulatory economy can generate energy that exceeds its own needs and which overflows into the spaces that surround it.

Working in a laboratory environment, students will develop knowledge by investigating and applying the possibilities of emerging theories, as well as testing new design territories such as scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, new materials, and cellular systems. Studio projects, alongside related design workshops and seminars, will focus on the challenges of developing and expanding the domain of emerging technologies in the design and production of architecture.

Mirco-techniques for combining the thresholds of the horrific-becoming-beautiful and the beautiful-becoming-horrific (grotesque) have imprinted themselves as visual-temporal cues on the current design retina. Monstrosity is the new sex. Lust still rules the empire of desire, only the desires are more elaborate – multiple, complex, intelligent, emotive. The importance of the multiplicity has finally opened the door for mutation as a permanent state of the present. We are becoming monsters – a species aroused by non-perfect images coming from perfect methodologies. Here is where the true transformation is happening. We are subverting the logic of perfection: what used to be about mastering the result of a non-perfect process is now about the production of monstrosity and the grotesque thought the mathematical perfection of an evolutive mechanism.

The studio proposes to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity. In the context of these conditions, the studio will focus in the generation and production of mutant micro behaviors that will accumulate to create species from systems, the will have the capaitiy to generate mutant energy.

1. The Case for Maximalism

In his seminal essay, The Solar Anus, Georges Bataille described the sun as a heavenly orifice in the sky, literally shitting light in a constant and unrelenting flow. In the light of its unstoppable luminous fecal expenditure the world grows. This figure is central to his theory of a general economy in which energy and substances intermingle and extinguish themselves without limit and without end, as opposed to a restrictive economy, in which their production and consumption is strictly circumscribed and curtailed.

Industrial modernity has treated the earth itself as a kind of anus, sucking black fuels out of its pores and greasing temporary empires with it. On the cusp of peak oil and climatic catastrophe, what use is it to argue (and design) for systems of maximum expenditure and of energy systems without limits?

2. Animal Economies: Biomass and Biofuel

The program calls for a veterinary hospital, and so the building will be filled with humans, with non-human animals of various sizes and species, with medical equipment, with medicines and chemicals, as well as the normal array of institutional infrastructure.

How can every element in this organic economy be considered as both a potential producer and consumer of energy? How do living and non-living inhabitants differ? How do they plug-in to the architectural systems?

We look at work in the philosophy of animality (Elizabeth Grosz and Sanford Kwinter) as well as draw upon speculative art and design in in the bioarts and biomedia movements to identify and posit innovative circuits between bodies, buildings and infrastructure.

3. Energy Cycles: Production into Consumption into Production

An energy producing architecture that is also an energy consuming architecture suggests that every component of the energy/engineering chain must be designed as a polyfunctional component in a cyclical ecology. Cradle to cradle design models are a key conceptual methodology to drive this.

Any given material form is but an instance in a trajectory of formation, expression, consumption, transformation, re-formation, re-expression, re-consumption, re-transformation, and so on.

Such principles have only begun to touch on architectural thinking. At most designers hope to employ recycled materials. But the ultimate horizon of this perspective is one that could and should radically displace conventional relationships between human and non-human actors within complex spatio-ecological networks. That is, what part of a design system can eat and be eaten? What is at stake the design of large-scale digestion?

4. Forms / Species / Kinetics

The cycle of production and consumption of energy is predicated on the multi-way mediation of flows. The building is a producer and consumer node in a small local network, feeding it kW, and a larger regional network feeing it mW and feeding kW from it.

In this, the design of the formal species on which and into which multiple architectures are embedded is in fact the design of the architectural physiology.

This Studio, a belated exercise in creatures, "becoming-animal," is not about the mimetic career of biology into and onto architecture, but of the transference of multiple physioiologic scales into the systemic intelligence of the involute surface-dwelling to produce energy, and back again. The ocular nerve of the owl, the locomotion of the giant jellyfish, the pack logistics of the rat(s), the program of the frog, are not just forms, organic symmetries and baroque geometries. They are machines, they are solutions, partial grammars to take shape for us, and we for them.

Flesh instead of surface, organs instead of volume. Flesh/organs are the two components that we intent to scrutinize in this studio. By means of tall structures and adjoin parts, the studio will reveal the design procedures as dynamic relationships. If mobile and transportation are primarily intervened by means of their dynamic strength, we will grow them by means of their topological intensity. Assuming at stake infrastructure transformation, we will concentrate in their mutation, thus not in the manner of structure, core or repetitive stacks, instead we will develop active nesting techniques whereas the inner body is not a sequential linear proliferation but rather a discontinuous organic growth, at the same time this inner mass will stretch in/out the outer flesh.