From the 9-17 July Liam Young will be coordinating a design studio for the Architectural Association visiting summer school in Madrid with Ricardo de Ostos principal of Naja & de Ostos and Tobias Klien of Horhizon. Shadowy forces have conspired to put together this axis of evil teaching lineup drawn from the most twisted and kinky studios the AA has to offer.  It will be a rock n roll 10 day intensive design studio including lectures, workshops and prototyping. Places are still available and you can sign up here.

The studio theme will be ‘Bleaching Green’ which will explore the relation between architecture and energy use in dense cities in the near future. The Bleaching Green workshop will venture into uncharted territories blending design intuition and technological invention. By casting a critical eye on current sustainability and environmental strategies, the course objective is to investigate architecture as a hybrid of artificial and natural systems.

Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today is part of Superfront gallery’s group show “Unplanned”. If you can’t make it to LA, the catalogue can be ordered online, which also features essays by Geoff Manaugh (BldgBlog), David Turnbull (GSAPP), MitchMcEwen (Superfront), Ines Moreira (Petit Cabanon) and Cristina Goberna Pesudo (Fake Industries Architectural Agonism). Writes Pesudo: “…it is in the lack of consensus where this exhibition succeeds the most, where perverse imaginaries create a field for disensus apart from institutionalized points of view…”

Exhibition runs until 2 July 2010.

Pacific Design Center # 208

8687 Melrose Avenue | West Hollywood, CA | 90069

I am pleased to announced that Wen Ying Teh and her project from the Menagerie studio at the AA ‘Necessary Monsters’ run by Liam Young and Kate Davies has been awarded the RIBA 2009 Bronze Medal. The studio have trawled the wilds of genetic modification, augmented bodies and neo biological invention to query today’s idealistic and preservationist views of the natural world. For three weeks we voyaged south, following Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos Islands and South America. We discovered a precious and fragile wilderness teetering at the point of collapse, an ecology in crisis, bearing the scars of a ravenous tourist economy. Projects were developed in this context as critical tools to instigate debate and raise questions about architectural practice in relation to the social and political consequences of various environmental and technological futures.  Read below for an exert of the project or explore it in full on the RIBA website.

An existing salt mine sits as a scar on the Galapagos Landscape. Once the natural habitat of Flamingos, this salt lake has long been a desolate space ravaged by the nearby restaurant industry. The Galapagos is caught between its massive contribution to the Ecuadorian economy and its value as a historic wilderness.

This project is conceived of as a provocation and speculation on how these two demands may be hybridized as an alternative to the typical conservationist practices applied across the islands. The two traditionally mutually exclusive programs of salt farming and Flamingo habitat are re imagined as a new form of symbiotic designed ecology; a pink wonderland, built from colored bacteria and salt crystallization, dissolving and reshaping itself with seasonal and evaporative cycles. The building becomes an ecosystem in itself, completely embedded in the context that surrounds it.

Formed from fine webs of nylon fibers held in an aluminum frame, this strange string instrument allows the salt farming process to be drawn up out of the lake, returning it to the endemic flamingos whilst at the same time ensuring the continuation of a vital local industry. Using just capillary action, salt water from the lake crystallizes on the tension strings forming glistening, translucent enclosures. It encrusts the infrastructure of a flamingo observation hide and solidifies into a harvestable field ready to be scraped clean by miners.

The project has been developed through scale models that were used as host structures for an in depth series of crystallization experiments. Material erosion, spatial qualities, structurally capacity and evaporative cycles were all determined through physical testing. The architecture and its physical models grew slowly across time, emerging from the salt waters they were immersed in, to become fully developed crystalline structures.

The Galapagos is an ecology in crisis. The project is positioned as part documentary, part science fiction offering both a rigorous technical study and a speculative near future wilderness. An evolving future for the islands is imagined and it demands an evolved and mutated architecture.

DIY Urbanism makes a debut in this quarter’s Urban Design magazine - the voice of many an embattled professional urban designer and sourcebook for shared surface roads, character-based place-making and high quality inclusive public realm (among other para-governmental best practice design guidance).

The journal devotes its regular Viewpoint pages to the “cheeky? incisive?” TTT project which is otherwise featured on this site as “How to be a successful urban designer” (scroll down for that post in this column).

The more people involved in the regeneration planning process, the more it seems to require very smart people to negotiate that process for an engaging and innovative urbanism. There’s a breed of urban designers who are struggling within a bureaucratic, risk-averse and stultifyingly political design environment - and it comes to light in any issue of the UDG journal.

But that’s no excuse for pattern-book common-denominator trite that passes for urban design - and DIY Urban Design’s main targets are those organisations that have a made a buck out of banal formulaic masterplans. Follow the 10 steps and you too can be an urban designer!

So what? That’s life, right? Well, here are two slightly random offerings that spring to mind and that might offer a way beyond.

Foucault turned his latter-day attention towards the elusive idea of the heterotopia, suggesting a more compelling urbanism was taking places outside of the control of a deliberate design agenda. Ok, so he didn’t really finish his speculations, but he implies a mode of enquiry that could constitute a fresh take on UK regeneration practice. Lesson 1: Value the obscure!

Thom Mayne has been expounding a kind of auto-generative design - part enjoying the messiness of the architectural process, part celebrating crazy and unexpected spatial experiences. He accepts the mediation of his design impulse by the forces surrounding his commission and ends up with works he is proud of, even as he eschews knowledge of them! Lesson 2: Enjoy the unexpected!
Want more ideas? The Slow Thoughts column will be filling up with more projects and slowly gestating work from the minds of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today.

And remember: Think twice before drawing a perimeter block!

More of my urban design ranting here.

Darryl Chen (Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today) and Elena Pascolo (Urban Projects Bureau) have just launched a unit in the Bartlett’s MArch Urban Design programme. Riffing on Colin Fournier’s overall course brief of Urban Fiction, we’ll be exploring the dark side of urbanism via a rigged Spanish Inquisition-like investigation of the spatial type. Download here, or read on….

Horse+Pig, Speedism

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

We find strangeness in the city all around us. Often the strangest and most flawed cities are the most compelling. From crime-riddled New York of the 70s, class-segregated Rio de Janeiro, hyperdense Hong Kong, and the synthetically artificial Tokyo, all are conditions of excess - often excesses of things that were good to begin with, but have become corrupted. Yet something about these cities makes them perversely attractive. Is it here we glimpse the true essence of urbanity? While we want to act upon the city with good intentions, there is no avoiding its byproducts, ruins, and failures.

In this unit, we will be exploring what happens when our desire gets the better of us, what happens when you have too much of a good thing. We will be exploring the urban type as the seed of disaster. Your urban fiction will be overlaid onto a future Los Angeles or London to turn it into a city of extreme dysfunction, a city on the road to ruin, a theatre of the grotesque, where an imbalance in the urban ecoolgy leads to dystopia.

But don’t worry if you’re not the pessimistic type. After first taking a bitterly pessimistic view of the world, right at the brink of total meltdown, we will then attempt to recover a productive outcome and even a new society. It would make for a killer plot twist.

Term 1: Your Own Personal Dystopia

1    The Protagonist
You will identify strange moments within the form of the city that offer powerful consequences - good or bad - for an urban future. Your intuition will lead you to a place you shouldn’t go, but is still strangely compelling. Often a DYS-topia is simply a U-topia gone wrong - and it only takes one fatal flaw to descend an idealistic vision into chaos. You will use work undertaken in the first three projects - LA/London comparison; Patchwork City and Recombinant Urbanism - as source material for a prolonged and focussed spatial analysis. From those projects you will identifiy one fundamental piece of the city that you want to take forward in investigation, and distill as a prime example of a distinct spatial type.

A spatial type is an unstable element that forms a fundamental building block for the city. Neither good nor bad, it offers the potential for a spectrum of urban effects depending on how it is configured and recombined. In this first term, you will suspend your do-gooder impulse and unleash your dark side.

Oil Rocks, Caspian Sea

2    Character Development
You will subject your specimen to a series of diagnostic tests. Laid on the operating table, you will seek to understand the specific peculiarities of your chosen type - to understand the forces that underpin its growth, what makes it so compelling, and the variables that will modify it. How far (wrong) could it go to defining a new world?

Political, economic and social factors are always evident in urban spatial configurations, and it is through various means of instrumental drawing that we can uncover these hidden truths. Over the remaining six weeks of Term 1 you will produce three extraordinary drawings that will form the perfect groundwork for your Term 2 propositions. You will draw the Plan, the Fragment and the Panorama. Detailed briefs and workshops for each of these will be issued separately in the following weeks. These exercises will first cause you to look at a part of the city in detail, before zooming out to explore its consequences at an urban scale.

Nafta Land, Richie Gelles

3    The Scenario
Your drawings will have led you to an intimate understanding of your spatial type, but also to a series of questions about its limits, its variabilities and its incongruencies. Not only have you analysed its functionality, but you have let its dysfunctions run wild and explored its potential for creating a glorious new dystopia. Your endgame will be a scenario where its dysfunctions have reached a breaking point. An imbalance of cosmic proportions.

Your folio will primarily comprise these three exquisite drawings that together describe your own personal dystopia within social, political and economic contexts. Think about presenting these as a captioned storyboard to sell to a movie studio boss. This is your scene setter. An urban fiction of a dystopian future. Is this the end? No, there’s a sequel!

Term 2: Urban Friction

Your investigations will have laid the setting for an encounter with a mutated future. Your detailed design project will be part of this continuum as you imagine a response to the dysfunctional world you created in Term 1. Your dystopia is a door through which you glimpse a strange new urbanism. One where the characters of the past move and dance in intriguing formations. Where the rubble of your spatial type has been reconfigured to gain its functionality, but now in ways you could never have expected at the outset of your journey.

Your diagrams and drawings from Term 1 provide a springboard into investigating this new world where friction - the rubbing together of different parts - is welcomed and nourished as a necessary condition of vitality.

We will now ground your work in a detailed urban design proposition (sited in LA or London) that strategically addresses the concerns of your first term’s dystopia. It will leverage the diagrammatic analysis of your spatial type to give a springboard to your critical imagination.

And the city lives happily ever after.

This year’s edition of Liam Young’s and Kate Davie’s Intermediate 7 design studio at the Architectural Association has just launched. Read on for this year’s agenda and watch this space as last years ‘Necesary Monsters’ studio projects will be posted shortly.

The end of The World and Other Bedtime Stories

‘The End of the Universe is very popular’, said Zaphod… ‘People like to dress up for it… Gives it a sense of occasion.’ - Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

We stare out through Hubble at the light from the creation of the universe. At CERN we hurl electrons at each other looking for clues to its beginning only to set in motion our collective anxieties about our demise in black-hole oblivion. We sit in wait for the end of the world. We have always regaled ourselves with unnerving tales of a day yet to come. Tomorrow is a dark place and our culture is full of tales of a natural world out of control. Whether it be nuclear apocalypse, viral epidemic, tumbling asteroids or eco catastrophe our anxieties about our future demise chronicle the flaws and frailties of the everyday.

This year Inter 7 continues to slip suggestively between the real and the imagined, in the space where architecture enters into new relations with the territories of science and fiction. It is an experience of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. Last year in the living wunderkammer of the Galapagos Islands, we explored the origin of the species and breathed life into a menagerie of architectural monsters. This year we will once again investigate our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world but this time we embark on a voyage to bear witness to the alien landscapes of technology. We have mused on evolution and now we will flirt with extinction.

We will set forth on a psychedelic road trip, a last chance saloon tour of sites at their point of collapse. We will clamber over the wreckage of the future to visit a no-man’s land between cultivation and nature and spin a cautionary tale of a new kind of wilderness. Here the radio crackles, skies darken, the weather warms, grey goo seeps from between the cracks, mutant crops roam free – it’s a beautiful day in the strange landscapes that lie behind the scenes of modern living.

Our projects may be militant solutions or last gasp redemptions; a call to arms or a head in the sand; swan songs, manifestos or glorious celebrations in the shadow of an imminent end. We will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentary and part science fiction, we will critically engage with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Standing at the brink we will contemplate an end that is laden with fears and inconsistencies yet at the same time proves to be ripe with unknown escapes and wondrous possibilities.

“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur– like creation– in grandiose splendor.” - Blaise Pascal

PROGRAMME

1. THE DOOMSDAY CULT.
Road trippers of the Apocalypse

We are looking for followers to join us in this world after the crash; to dance in the shadow of catastrophe and question our fears and misgivings about the future. The site for the first term will be our own bodies and a tricked out, hotted up psychedelic mobile home. As a unit will be forming a doomsday cult, we will throw open the doors of the AA, leave the school behind as we travel cross country preaching the word. We will open up the architectural practise to include the instigation of debate and the raising of questions about the social and political consequences of various environmental and technological futures. We will not go quietly into the night but in our bus we will forge an intentional community, activist architectures, eco terrorist responses and maverick manifestos.

1A. Taxonomy of fears.
To begin we will document and research headlines and news reports, websites and radio broadcasts referring to fears for the future and construct a multimedia exhibition in our cult studio. It will be a travelling circus, an overwhelming assault on the senses, exploring our relationship to these messages of apocalyptic doom and the way in which they filter into the everyday ordinariness of our daily lives.

1B. Props and Paraphernalia
For the major term 1 project we will breathe life into the characters and actions of our cult. We will furnish our cult home with all the belongings no cultist could be without. Across the term we will design and make Uniforms, Weaponary, Survival wear, Propoganda, forged newspaper articles, blogs, websites, street posters, megaphones, rituals, performances, treasured belongings and artefacts salvaged from the future. They will be props for films and documentaries we will make, they will instigate direct architectural actions and they will keep you warm on our field trip through the artic.  The cults fictional constructions will be moulded entirely from the raw stuff of reality, your work will be superfictions,  blending seamlessly with the real. Passers by and the rest of London will be unable to discern what is real and what is your project.

2.FAREWELL WORLD!
A Journey to the end of the earth

We will voyage to the edge of the world, ‘the last wilderness’, We will head into the darkness of an eternal polar night. Dogs will pull us across a constantly shifting landscape of ice and water , a land of mirages , sun halos and towering icebergs. We will listen for the call of the wolverines, stalk the caribou and Arctic hare. We will pilgrimage to visit the glaciers for the last time before they melt, we will track the last of the polar bears, we will shed a tear under the electric sky of the aurora. An inhospitable place, at the precipice of the issues of today; a loaded landscape,  to some the iconic register of global warming,   to some romantic vision of a long lost wilderness, to some a wasteland rich in natural resources. Beneath the sleepy snowdrift it is a highly political and fiercely contested territory.  We will embrace the aching beauty and sinister undercurrent of the Arctic. We will tip our hats and farewell the world as we know it before heading home to imagine what comes next.

3. THE CULT COMPOUND
A village for the dammed

Your final projects will be a constellation of architectural proposals for the Doomsday Collective. The props, paraphernalia and new mythologies developed across the year will condense as the architectural fragments of our Cult compound. We will not impose typologies or prescribe programmes but your projects will be born from your own ambitions, dreams, fears and obsessions.

You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentary and part science fiction, we will critically engage with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Our speculative projects will offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios. Your projects will present alternative architectures as test sites for the deployment of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales.

Standing at the brink we will contemplate an end that is laden with fears and inconsistencies yet at the same time proves to be ripe with unknown escapes and extraordinary possibilities.

‘Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.’
 J G Ballard

Another spinoff from the Thrilling Wonder Stories gig we co curated is this futurist menage e trois organised with Icon Magazine between TWS contributors architect Francois Roche, blogger Geoff Manaugh and graphic novelist Warren Ellis. It was edited and transcribed by Icon’s Justin McGuirk and William Wiles and is published in their september issue. Also check out the same issue for William Wiles review of Roche’s kinky new project ‘I’m Lost in Paris’. Read the full conversation after the jump.

Last weekend the Watermans Gallery sponsored a kick-off event for the ‘Power of 8′ project. Opening up our discussion to the public, a steady stream of participants ranging from the radically activist to the playfully naive populated a main table with walking houses, snow stimulators, solar powered airships, public free boxes, new wireless connectivity and human spinning tops. More images here.

Much like a heist movie that assembles the maximum human potential with the greatest chance of internal conflict, Power of 8 has gathered together the perfect cast to take on the future: an interactive designer and filmmaker, bionanotechnologist, advertising executive, emotional intelligence trainer, social policy advisor, permaculturalist and political commentator. Add TTT to the mix and there’s a plot worth paying the rights for! Final exhibition in September promises to be spectacular. Keep your eyes peeled to this channel for more updates.

On 14th July at the Barbican Liam Young hosted a screening of two amazing films, ‘Buckminster Fuller Meets the Hippies’ and ‘Counter Communities’, for the Architecture Foundation’s Architecture on Film series. See the Spaceship Earth and the Designer Guru website for film and event details. Liam wrote the following essay to accompany the screening.

Once Upon an Island: Utopian Cowboys, Guru Astronauts and Other Hopeful Tales of Misadventure

The hippies gather round, they sit together on the grass as Bucky holds court at their centre, waxing lyrical, a suited up,  button down island in a sea of beads, headbands, beards and cowboy hats. Children giggle, smoke and optimism fill the air and the crowd blows bubbles that float off, glistening like the geodesic domes of Bucky’s utopian dreams. The hippies had lots of questions and it appeared Buckminster Fuller had all the answers. He was a prophet, a counter culture guru, a mad scientist and maverick architect. For Guinea Pig B, as he came to call the experiment that was the fashioning of his own life, we are all astronauts on this great spaceship earth, and any individual has the capacity to change its course.

Fuller’s vision of this ‘one world island’ as a wholly integrated system consuming the most minimal of earth’s resources finds its expression in the Counter-Communities of Croy and Elser’s film. Erupting from the utopian dreams of the 60’s and 70’s these green islands lie mostly in the deserts of New Mexico and California. Amidst the cults of UFO spotters resident believers tell their tales of turning the soil, looking out across the horizon and sewing the seeds of their ideal tomorrow. To re-evaluate these communities they can be sited within a history of utopian projects, an invisible geography of private revolutions and radical reinventions that embody a critique of the current state of affairs, and herald an audacious desire to change the world.

A part of this speculative atlas is the phenomena of self initiated Micronations. Suspended within the familiar spaces of the everyday a vagabond troupe of DIY eccentrics, adventurers and malcontents have conjured their own archipelago of ideal communities. These fictional states vary in physical scale from the islands of 17th century pirate utopias, to Sealand, an illegal radio station on an abandoned anti air craft tower in the middle of the North Sea or the  sitting room of a disgruntled postal worker in an anonymous flat in east London. Their founders are Robinson Crusoe’s inventing islands for ourselves to inhabit in an embrace of an alternative world, motivated by a disenchantment with the commonplace.

Parallels can also be drawn with the Gated communities born not from the hopes but from the fears of the time. They sit as protected pockets of picket fences and manicured lawns floating within the mean seas of the surrounding everyday. These physical boundaries are reimagined as states of mind in the chemical utopia of Aldous Huxley’s 1962 sci fi ‘Island’ where it takes but two pink pills before dinner to be cured of all our anti social tendencies. Another hallucinogenic counter community formed on a flight of fancy around the US aboard the technicolor bus immortalised by journalist Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’. Their cocktails of cordial and LSD took those willing on a wild ride into the utopian dreams of a psychedelic destination simply named ‘Further’.

In a twisted echo a decade later the grape Kool-Aid death throws at Jonestown signalled the end of another counter community originally envisioned as self sufficient and free from the ills of racism and sexism. 900 disciples sipped that poisoned punch and followed Jim Jones, one more self styled guru all the way to a paradise lost. It seems that inevitably, with the maverick captains of the earth ships in the desert also comes the likes of David Koresh and the smoldering remains of his Branch Davidian compound in the aptly named Waco, Texas. These are some of the catastrophic ends to the 60’s and 70’s utopian tendencies, cautionary tales of when imaginary utopias are projected into real world. One community’s dream of utopia is another’s nightmarish suicide pact.

Ideal communities always tread the ambiguous line between fascism and liberation. Whether real or fictional they divide against themselves and reveal the inevitable contradictions within our culture and ourselves. It is these inconsistencies however, that also contribute to their vitality, and we should judge them not on the value of their physical manifestations but rather celebrate their will to experiment. This is a utopia not as ideal form but as ‘what if’ strategy. Occupying this space between the actual and the imagined is what gives utopias their critical edge.

Fuller himself has stated that although he invented throughout his life it is not the particularities of each invention that was of interest to him. His ambitions were rather the overall strategy of ‘humanities comprehensive success in the universe’ so, as he famously proclaimed, “I could have ended up designing a pair of flying slippers”. Similarily, when we reflect on the gallant astronauts of the Counter Communities we should focus not on the successes or failures of their architecture but the way the hopes and ideals to which they give expression compel us to confront issues that are now more urgent than ever. So in a moment of recession chic, as the temperatures rise, when it seems that the future must again become a project let’s look back to a time of rose coloured skies, tip our cowboy hats to guru Bucky and set sail for our own archipelago of brave new worlds.

The Thrilling Wonder Stories architecture and science fiction symposium curated by Tomorrow’s Thought’s Today’s Liam Young and BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh has been uploaded so it can now be watched on demand as an onlne stream from the Architectural Association. The whole day is broken down into 4 videos. You can watch the first installment here or go to the index page for the others.

Description:

 ‘Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.’ J G Ballard

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative tales of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of the near future with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined they offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios. In this symposium, speculative practitioners from such fields as gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art present alternative models as test sites for the deployment of the wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales of our own architectural imaginings.

Speakers include

Intros by Brett Steele and Liam Young

Geoff Manaugh (Chair)
Journalist, Commentator, Author. Founder of blog BLDGBLOG
Vicktor Antonov
Art Director for game ‘Half Life 2’ and Production Designer for film ‘Rennaissance’.
Francois Roche and Stephanie Lavaux
R&Sie architects Paris.
Warren Ellis
Comic author. Creator of ‘Transmetropolitan’ and ‘Fell’, writer for Marvel and DC comics.
Ian Macleod
Science Fiction Novelist. Winner of 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction
Archigram- Peter Cook/Dennis Crompton
Seminal visionary architecture group
Squint Opera
Film and media production studio.
Jim Rossignol
Gaming author and journalist.
Nic Clear
Editor of ‘Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design’ and Bartlett U15 tutor