SIAL - Cultivating Life

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Involvements: Pia Ednie-Brown, Boo Chapple, Inger Mewburn, Tim Schork, Adele Varcoe

“a commitment to the cultivation of life is a practice whose value far transcends the pettiness of individual products; it represents an heroic enlargement of work to an ethics, and a commitment to a human social ecology that far exceeds the usual posture of voluntary submission to the law of markets. No one knows where such an experiment will go, and it is one certainly rife with traps and dead ends. What is most beautiful about it, in fact, might well be its potential to magnify risk.” Sanford Kwinter

In a climate of global-warming anxiety is it just a waste of time to think about aesthetics, when we should be focussing on radical efficiencies and the minimisation of waste and consumption? Or, as some engineers would have it, is beauty always found in extreme efficiency? Is ornament a crime in this climate of environmental crisis?

This studio involves developing architectural propositions to support and/or provoke ways of living that are committed to the cultivation of life, in the sense that Kwinter discusses above.

Drawing on research from last semesters seminar, Contaminated Life, we will be looking at ‘sustainable living’ in terms of transformability: the eradication of waste and/or contaminants through the notion that everything can be transformed into something else. Fundamentally, this involves a transformation of current ways of living.

This studio is part of a cross-disciplinary project called the Biospatial Workshop. Linked to the Contagious Life seminar, this larger project also involves input and exchange with students from fashion, environmental science and audiovisual technology. Each discipline works on different aspects of the larger research project with special sessions in which interactions between them occur. The project also involves an artist in residence, Boo Chapple, whose work could be described as experimental bio-art. She is involved in the larger project in a variety of ways. Supported by a grant, this studio has a dedicated studio space provided in building 91.

Design investigations will entail the development of plastic, parametric generative systems. There will be sessions learning the Generative Components parametric software (with Tim Schork). Generative analogue or material investigations will play an equal, if not more important, role. We will be exploring ornament (seen to defile modernist aesthetic purity) as structural or fundamental to the development of form, rather than extraneous.

Brief (in brief):
1. How can a house be transformed into a hybrid program of studio, scientific laboratory, a business premises and the usual domestic configurations?
2. Could the transformations above, based on speculations about ways of living, be expanded to encompass a largely commercial stretch of High Street with the aim at eliciting an ethos of ‘the cultivation of life’ in a specific, inner urban community?