August 7 - September 2, 2017

Led by Christoph Kumpusch with Alessandra Calaguire

This 3 Week immersive workshop is organized around three parts and three places: New York City, California, and Black Rock Desert. In New York, students will join the Extraction Laboratory’s research team, as we design and fabricate a roof to be deployed at the GSAPP Burning Man Camp. In California, and the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man, the team will: 1. Assemble / Roof structure and Installation; 2. Report / Live from the desert; 3. Program / Host a series of public programs + lecture series. There are three goals we will work towards achieving with our Installation: 1. Architecture and Politics: The roof will provide a common ground of discourse. 2. Architecture and Situations: The roof will extract what is the most absent in the Desert: WATER. 3. Architecture and Elements: The roof creates a habitable desert landscape. The workshop will stand on three legs and Participants will work on three elements: 1. Documentation [The feedback- loop]; 2. Habitation [The Camp]; 3. Installation [The Roof]. With the desert as a canvas, and Burning Man as a context, this workshop is an opportunity for students to become part of a research team that extracts architecture from situations, rather than places. We will create and build architecture for the desert. The roof is an energy field of extracted grids deployed in the desert. The installation extracts water on the playa, with a field of fog catchers. Human Scale and Desert Scale, the project extends the notion of techniques of modularity in order to create new patterns of ritual, procession, and inhabitation at Burning Man. It promotes interaction with immediate experience: a living playground for desert inhabitants, extracting and sustaining life in the desert. In application, the architecture acts as a collection of flows working together as modules modulating: Temperature, Density, Mobility, + Hydration. The installation promotes the situational resilience of life [in the desert]. Output: Burning Man installation, live video feed from the desert, an exhibition at the MaK Center in LA, a series of desert lectures, and an archive of the video/ photo/ written documentation.