BSc Architecture, Year 2
2009-2010 @ The Bartlett, University College London
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/programmes/units/unit03_10.htm
TUTORS:// Jan Kattein + Liam Young
PROGRAM:// FROM THE WASTELAND
We are at a point of collapse. We gaze out across the wastelands of our contemporary condition. The birds call as they pick at the debris of our consumption economy. Rolling hills of our made to break technologies glistening in the setting sun, the dust swirls across barren lands scraped clean of their resources. Sprawling savannas of picket fence suburbs sit at the edge of rising seas. Filled with all their strange new beasts these new forests force upon us another way of thinking about our impact on the world. It is a wildlife documentary filled with all the contradictions and inconsistencies of our contemporary cities. It is an artificial nature, an urban landscape formed from the unmappable growth of the familiar and the unrelenting march of progress.
Across history new creative impulses have often emerged from wounded or decaying environments, political disasters, scarcity of resources and natural catastrophes. It seems that things at their point of collapse have their most redemptive potential. In the face of depleting resources we will re examine our relationship with the products and by products of our technological culture.
We will travel to this end of the world, dance in shadow of catastrophe and embrace the necessity for invention that lies ahead. We will not go quietly into the night but will forge activist architectures, eco terrorist responses, maverick inventions and impractical solutions. In London we will invent physical prototypes and then set sail for distant lands to speculate on their consequences. We will salvage from through the remnants of our cities while at the same time documenting their immanent collapse. Perhaps the things that may bring about the end of the world will offer us an escape.