With Erick Carcamo
Special Guests: Mark Gage / Peter Franfurt - Imaginary Forces
Scripting Workshop by Nick Puckett

The studio is interesting in exploring potential architectural expressions of a contemporary biopolitical malaise. The symptoms are many are don't point to any single condition or cause, and we're working with just a few that interest us in particular.

What is the family today and what could it be? The conflicts of Modernity, from laboratory-assisted reproduction to European Islam, revolve to a significant degree around the transformation or conservation of particular biosociological arrangements, of family models. The globalization of Western design forms has also meant a globalization of dwelling programs originated for a historically contingent nuclear family structure. We argue that the mismatches between architectural conventions for the habitat and the multiplicity of biosociologial realities are severe. This studio will explore other possibilities by attempting to accommodate one particular, highly idiosyncratic client condition that would be entirely unsuited to a conventional home.

In this we hope to pick up some of the remaining trace signals left over from a previous era's interest in using architecture to model new, progressive families, family spaces and biosociological communities in contemporary cities. We will absorb both the optimistic and progressive as well as the menacing and dystopian, and for this studio, will liberally apply precedents from all of these.

Living in an era of images and effects, we easily confuse movies with reality, and design our studios accordingly. One sign of a generalized apocalypse culture is the popularity of Zombie movies. Their discursive symbologies are rich: a panic over the instability of the human body in the face of new biomodernities, a seething class/race warfare latent in a unstable and degenerate political economy, the end of history through an untethering of social bonds, a loss of meaning within the collective body now an autonomic consuming horde, etc. etc. all told through the parables of cannibalism and very specifically symbolized architectural defenses, such as dead malls and dark basements.  What could be better?

We are also interested in the continued liberation of the formal stylistic language from Bubble Culture. Post-Bilbao, the 00's saw the unfortunate enrollment of architecture in the service of delusional speculative capital, and of the blobular (convolution, involution and continuous surface geometries) as perhaps the signature style of this culture of false luxury.

The recent studio conducted by me has been working in different territory --an exploration of far darker themes and less concern for the provision of flattering elegance-- and it is critical that we act in this historical moment to strongly differentiate it from the brand baubles of the big bubble.

The studio proposed to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity. In the context of these conditions, the studio focused in the generation and production of mutant micro-behaviors that would accumulate to create species from systems.

The studio will explore the predominant effect of this 'isomorphism' being the aggregation of diverse forms of design intelligence into an almost universal condition of image production.  Perhaps some might see this as a triumph of superficiality over depth, but it's certainly also an intensification of the conjectural and fictive logics of design. We see this as a real and complex demand that global network culture makes on producers of architectural content.

We expect a full a development of the house, drawing, models, details.
- The studio will include a trip Los Angeles, Site visit, consulting with Imaginary Forces and Design & Fabrications Labs.
- The studio will include software Tutorials and a Scripting Workshop to be conducted by Nick Puckket from the Architectural Association.

Program
Wheelchair man with two families in one house
he was attacked by zombies and lost his legs
family one wife one, now Muslim, one daughter, one son X
family two wife two, progressive biotechnologist, one adopted daughter engaged to son X, one adopted baby boy, man's father is frozen cryogenically and tissue samples are used to culture artificial proteins used to sell black market supertofu. hufu. human flavored tofu. for recovering zombies.

Site of the old dog park in silver lake Los Angeles
Living quarters for both families taking into consideration their individual and collective needs. these can be sorted in any way you feel appropriate, from one big room to many small to joining spaces.
1- large freezer
2- prayer room facing mecca separated from all men's quarters by several partitions.
3- secure camp area for occasional squatters, may double as Hufu dispensary.
4- secure perimeter
5- viewpoint for maximum visual view
6- three living rooms
7- kitchen, bathroom and lab space can be integrated.

Readings
World War Z
Zombie Survival Handbook
Form Follows Fiction: Neutra House, S. Lavin
Un-Private House, Terry Riley.
Friedland, "Crestwood Hills"
Living Machines: Sexual Ideology, Michael Jones
Greg Lynn, Embryological House
B Sterling, living house story
Ballard, Stellavista
Ballard, High Rise, excerpt
Jenks, collapse of Pruitt-Igoe
Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Zombie film book
Jencks collapse
Crestwood Hills
Kommune
New Babylon

Movies
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead (new)
Dawn of the Dead (old)
Day of the Dead
Diary of the Dead
28 Days Later
Zombie
Serpent and the Rainbow
The Stink of Flesh
Quarantine
Planet Terror
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Psycho
Southland Tales
Habitat
Rear Window
Candyman
The Haunting
The Innocents
The Grudge
House on Haunted Hill
Manson family

Case Studies
OMA Bourdeaux house
SLAVIN house, Greg Lynn
Richard Neutra houses in sliverlake, Los Angeles
Kommune
London one, Genesis
Crestwood hills
Polygamist mormons, how layout city.
Glass House, Phillip Jhonson  
Seroussi Pavillion, Xefirotarch
Ghery House, Frank Ghery
Ville Savoye, Le Courbousier
Masion LaRoche, Le Courbousier
Embioligical House, Greg Lynn
Moebious Hose, UN Architects

SCHEDULE
Week s 1-3
Research on Topologies of Case studies
Software tutorials
Cinematic Aesthetics
Development of Cell systems
Weeks 4 to 7
Design Strategies
Mutation 1 of the project
Scripting Workshop
Weeks 7 to 10
Midterm
Field Trip to Los Angeles
Site visits
Fabricators companies
Imaginary Forces
Mutations 2 & 3
Weeks 10 to 14
Development of the House / Final Mutation