Unit 13

Sam Clark

The final tower looked at symbiotic industries that could function and benefit one another. Humid moisture rich environment created by the solar collection canopy is used for the grown of food plants. The hydroponic units used to grow the plants is used to store heat during to day to be re-radiated during the night continuing to drive the solar updraft, the hydroponic decks are also used to create shade and coolth for the supporting functions. The tower construction is required in order to create stack effect, driving the solar updraft, is capitalised upon as a support for inhabited spaces.

xinyu xie

谢新宇

Sam Clark

1:20 Model – Media facade engaged on damaged wall.

[Thomas Impiglia]

This represents a single screen and portion of the elevated walkway.  The entire building will be covered in over 100 of these structural panels which will be shrouding the damaged areas of the facade of the original structure.  The walkways will provide a way to experience the ruined architecture from within the facade.

Video created by media artists will be projected onto the large screens at night, whilst during the day the natural metal screen will be exposed.

Work In Progress: Project Elevation Drawing

Geraldine Holland

Spatial imaginings from a textual description

Responding to the textual description for ‘Sense of Architecture, Rethinking the “Infinite Potentialities”, In Homage to Luigi Nono, curated by Charlotte Pochhacker and Designed by Alexander Kada.  This drawing is a visual response to the space suggested in the script.

“…the shattering of traditional patterns of perception as the essential political process in artistic and architectural creation…space of sound…two-dimensional image worlds…architectonic structures and objects in an expansive , spatial arrangement as a visual atlas in there-dimensional space… an “instrument of spatial perception”…Mulitple projections… a subtle interplay of the projection bodies and their transparent surfaces, there evolves a myriad of perspectives, through-views and visual references in the real exbition space and between the projected and reflected image spaces.  The visitor becomes part of the spatial construction, only his movement through the exhibition dispotif reveals the complex references of the composition (s) of the exhibition space and the image space…”

This is a work in progess

xinyu xie

谢新宇

currently looking at internal spatial organization and structure of each umbrella/crater. the basic idea is the studio units will be located at the upper area, whilst the comercial/recreational service area will be located near the ground level, which can be accessed by not only the residents of the studio, but also general tourist to the island.

xinyu xie

谢新宇

The Hashima Island will be developed as a resort/ retreat for creative class to live and work for a certain period of time( up to 6 months). On-demand studio space and infrastructure, supplementary services needed for a resort will also be provided.
Besides, there will also be a tall tower addressing the issues of density in the Island, which will be used for food production, accommodating the need of not only Hashima, but the whole Nagasaki Perfecture.
The aim is to promote Hashima Island as a “ creative island”, for creative class from Japan and all over the world to search for/ share ideas and inspiration, in order to regenerate Hashima Island, and finally to stimulate the local economy of Nagasaki Perfecture, which at the moment, largely depends on existing tourism industry.
As more and more creative class are attracted to visit the island, the fame of the “creative island” increases,
and the local economy being stimulated, the architecture will be self-regenerated as a respond.

The main strategy will be to sustain the existing buildings on the island as it is, because of its historical importance
and value for tourism.
All the proposed structure will be built on top of the existing layer, and as the existing buildings have all
been aged to a certain level, the new builiding need to have its own structure, thus the intercation/service
cores will be structural “core” as well as the communication and circulation core.
All the service cores will form together as a “cloud floating” above the existing buildings, not only to support
the proposed programs and also to temper the surrounding environment.

• From simple organisational rules I am able to produce configurations  from a single entity
• The architecture should encourage adaptation, mass customisation and space on demand.
• Be appropriate to context of economic extremes and urban juxtaposition. (Legal/Illegal)
• Provide a stable, scalable solution for power generation.

Key Areas of Research:

• Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science
• Cellular Automata : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
• Theo van Doesburg:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Doesburg (Organisational Strategy).
• Object orientated programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented
• Gambiarra: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambiarra
• Float House, Morphosis: http://www.morphopedia.com/projects/float-house
• OLPC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

Wardenclyffe Tower was meant to fulfill Tesla’s ambition to uplift humanity by bringing electricity to the masses a century ago. Today, we live in a world where we are already entwined with electricity, it is as essential as air and water for our civilization to survive. Wardenclyffe Tower, if built today, would not need to transmit electricity as Tesla originally envisaged, as the infrastructure that Tesla sought to bring wirelessly has now been ingrained into our environment, albeit through electricity grids. What would, or should, the new tower offer?

We are now approaching an epoch where ubiquitous manufacturing will soon be upon us: the Diamond Age. Already the first generations of  Universal Constructors as envisaged by John von Neumann are being built, spread throughout the world through the internet. For now they are rudimentary, printing in a mono material. Current research however, seeks to integrate mechatronic capabilities into the machine. Science fiction has foretold the coming of the Diamond Age where nanotechnology offers unlimited molecular manipulation and construction. In a world where you can make anything and everything at the push of a button, our current models for social and economic progression will be found lacking.

The Universal Compiler 0.1 is a proposal for a Wardenclyffe Tower that will address the issues of:

1. A public access point to what will be a new norm for society: ubiquitous manufacturing.
2. A repository of data for compiling, based upon open source platforms and initiatives.
3. A response to the changes that society will undertake in order to emerge as a functional Diamond Age model.

The goal of this project is to share the monstrosities of war through the exhibition of peoples war time experiences by way of story telling.  Buildings damaged by war become restored and transformed into “memory labs” in which people can come and share and record their stories in communal and private spaces.  The records of these stories will be presented within the buildings broken facades and interiors.  Although the first “memory lab” will be located in the ruins of the Defense Ministry of Serbia and Montenegro building in Belgrade, any structure damaged by war in any culture can be re-constructed and transformed into another “memory lab.”  This project will form an international network of wartime memories which will be exchanged and shared across the world. Through the sharing of common wartime experience, the knowledge of the public is captured and dispensed via these structures in order to provide a visceral education in empathy.

Nikola Tesla believed that the results of his inventions would be for the betterment of humanity.  His proposal for a new Wardenclyffe tower and adjunct laboratory was to give the world access to this new source of power, wireless electricity. For this design proposal, stories of individuals war-time experience becomes equated to electrical energy in a speculative approach to the purpose of Wardenclyffe Tower. In this case, knowledge in the form of memory is not being defined as a force of nature but rather as an intellectual force that has an equally potent impact on this planet; knowledge is the power source on which all humanity runs.  By openly sharing people’s personal experiences of war, we purge our ignorance and instill empathy in the fabric of human civilization.
In terms of the structure itself, what is proposed here is not to recreate and reanimate what was there before, but rather to instill a sense of forward momentum by creating something new out of the old. in his proposal for the restoration of the Electrical Management (Elektroprivreda) Building in Sarajevo, Bosnia Lebbeus Woods said:

“Important civic and cultural monuments no doubt will be restored to their undamaged condition, as tokens of past coherence that might serve as models of civilized thought and activity. However, such restorations inevitably reaffirm a past social order that ended in war. The attempt to restore the fabric of old cities to their former conditions is, therefore, a folly that not only denies postwar conditions, but impedes the emergence of an urban fabric and way of life based upon them. Wherever the restoration of war-devastated urban fabric has occurred in the form of replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, it ends as parody, worthy only of the admiration of tourists.” (<http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/the-reality-of-theory/>)

In light of this,  the Memory Lab cannot be a restoration which merely recreates the character of Belgrade prior to the war.  Belgrade has suffered over 155 recorded wars and has been razed to the ground 44 times, this history must be considered when engaging in any reconstruction.  To rebuild that which has been destroyed many times over must defy the act of war entirely, and enhance the future of the culture.

Contemporary Philosopher Slavoj Zizek spoke of monuments to civilization as Philosopher Georg Flachbart spoke of Utopia, two extremes always exist at once and must be some how reconciled in architecture: “Every monument to Civilization is equally a monument to Barbarism. Civilization is the distinct recognition that barbarism exists.” (Zizek, Slavoj, 2009) “1) How to live without utopia(s) and not be a monster? and 2) How to talk utopia(s) and not be a monster? …No matter what we decide we will in both cases be monsters.” (Georg Flachbart Golem Reloaded: A Teatime Utopia, Submitted on Sat, 2006-09-23)

According to these thoughts, there is no course which architecture can take which does not arrive at a negative extreme of either becoming barbarous or monstrous, thus perhaps it must be accepted and embraced.  The very existence of the Defense Ministry building already embodies the barbarous nature of humanity through the act of war, by rebuilding the structure through the very memories of conflict, a monument to monstrosity and barbarism becomes also a monument to civility and peace.

[Thomas Impiglia]

The Game Play Transcripts

by Paul Broadbent

P1, P2, P3, P4.

work in progress.

To be continued…

Keji Majekodunmi

The essence of my project is to enable the creative mind within the populations of the world whom have limited access to energy, technology and knowledge.

The chosen site is the Ogonilands situated in Rivers state, southern Nigeria. Nigeria is the sixth leading oil producer. Over a quarter trillion dollars in oil has been lifted from Nigerian soils and waters in the last 40years. Ironically in the region where 100% of Nigeria’s oil comes from- the Niger Delta, there exists an enormous disparity between the oil wealth generated and the wealth of the population who live on that site. People living in the Niger delta have found themselves in a situation where the government and the international oil companies own all the oil under their feet, the revenues of which are rarely seen by the people who are suffering from the consequences of it. Almost 7000 oil spills occurred between 1970 and 2000 in the Niger delta, this calculates to more than 1 spill a day.

The environmental damage to the Niger delta has had a severe impact on the local economy of the indigenous people whose lively hoods depend on their local agricultural industry. Large areas of farm land and rivers are literally drenched in crude oil, as a direct result of lax regulations on the oil companies.

The UNEP (United Nations environmental program) in conjunction with the Nigerian government and the SPDC (Shell Petroleum Development Company) are carrying out extensive research and tests in the Ogonilands to get a clearer idea of the environmental impact of many years of oil drilling. Research into the contaminated areas of the Ogonilands will help the UNEP find the best solutions in rehabilitating the land to conditions that are environmentally acceptable, according to international standards.

The UNEP’s assessment sites lie within the regions of Eleme, Tai, Khana and Gokana in the Ogonilands, Rivers State. Once the assessment and the following rehabilitation have been completed, the UNEP plans to collaborate with Ogoni communities to build local capacity through training programs funded by the SPDC. The programmes will be designed to strengthen local knowledge and enable communities to enhance their institutional and individual capabilities for development with minimal damage to the environment.

The brief I have set for myself is to design the four institutions to house the UNEP’s local capacity training programs as well as environmental rehabilitation facilities and research labs. These four institutions will be situated in the UNEP assessment sites mentioned above. The building project will consist of innovation enabling spaces and spaces used in the regeneration of polluted rural sites.

The new Wardenclyffe tower is to act as an enabling platform, providing an accessible infrastructure that is easily understood through the viewing of the technology contained within it.

I feel that the tower should be positioned to engage with non-developed cultures, this will enable new understanding of the technology displayed, formed outside of western education. I have chosen to design for the Australian aborigine, the wireless transmission of electricity stands to benefit these populations with semi nomadic culture, the aborigine have a spiritual understanding that the sun, air, earth, fire and humans are all intricately linked which is expressed through “the dreamtime stories”.

“The dreamtime stories” are tales passed from generation to generation and form the basis for the aborigine way of life. There is an understanding of how to cultivate the earth according to seasonal cycles as well as how to fertilize the land through the application of fire, during the winter seasons roots a foraged for, this practice is formed from the understanding that the earth acts as a store preserving the food within it.

To find a location for the tower I looked at the traditional trackways and meeting point for the aborigine, as well as the current routes regualarly used when accessing medical centers. I feel that it is important that the tower should not be destructive to the land in its construction as this would contrary to the teachings of “the dreamtime stories”, it is vital however that the tower has an extensive underground element to function. Instead of digging I looked to utilise natural caves or abandoned mines.

Two sites were considered, the first is a traditional meeting point closed to the northern border of the Australian Capital Territories, the site is a placed where trackways converge, as well as being on land that was seasonally used by tribes for the cultivation of crops. This site was discredited due to the lack of current movement by aborigine tribes through the area.

I have located the idea site 25km south of Alice Springs. The site is a disused mine closed in the 1970′s, it is close to traditional aborigine trackways as well as being within zones of current movements to and from the medical centre.