Academic
-
Burning Wastelands
Moving away from heavy mainstream infrastructures students explored platforming technologies, unconventional laboratories and guerrilla compounds, partly commentary, partly speculative, partly culturally injected. We critically reviewed India’s sacred and scientific as well as high-tech and low-tech sides in order to understand and discuss via design the high-contrast scene and processes involved in energy extraction, exchange/transfer, manufacturing, final use/consumption and renewal/feedback loop.
Numerous time based prototypes were built throughout the year to test and explore energy relationships, effects and performatic behaviours. Digital and analogue, fabricating and DIY techniques were used in order to hack and tinker daily live objects from electronic toys, antique mobile phones, vintage computers and musical instruments. From these experimentations some strange-behaving creatures emerged which later on turned into fine tuned wonderful designs that dream, dance, live/die, grow and sing, forming peculiar ecologies of novel energy-beings.
-
Worlds from Words IV – DIY Suns
This semester the atelier investigated energy relationships based on techno-social environments. In this noir thriller investigation crimes of sustainability involved strange characters – energy mega waste, kilowatt corrupts and heartbeat junkies – in search of expression and tolerance between humans and space.
Students investigated alternative zones of energy relationships experimenting on how people viscerally relate to natural and urban resources. Waste and abundance energy concepts were spread in the field of human emotions. What is energy laziness, energy narcissism or energy passion and what would be the space for it?
Concepts of urban impact and participation were essential to create experiments and spaces. The final result is a process and an unfinished conversation. As a process of interaction and time based architecture this novel ecology of beings only works when talked to. In this sense energy is an exchange between systems, humans and environment, unfinished and collective.
-
Worlds from Words III – Rebel Delirium
The atelier aims to introduce contemporary concepts of narrative (time) architecture to create an augmented participative ecology. A place where the fragility of human habitat meets our desire for knowledge, discovery and understanding in an ever-changing world.
Students investigated extreme possibilities of cultural manifestation via interactive environments. By the study of time based architecture we explored ecologies that can adapt to changing conditions in order to create an architecture imposed by behaviour and participation alongside living organism patterns. Students started off with manufacturing small-scale creatures that functioned either as garments, urban furniture or architectural component. Later on this Frankenstein ecology emerged as an architecture of biological and mechanical devices to survey, protect or simply tell stories about the urban context.
-
Myths of the Artificial
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.“ The Sandman, Neil Gaiman
Focusing on life’s most precious resource: water, and its sacred and cultural aspects, Inter 3 leaped outside the dominant scientific strict approach to infrastructural ecologies and into the world of myths looking for fresh paths and inspirations. The paramount idea was to research the artificiality as an interface between man and nature, city and resources, culture and environment.
With the worlds largest democracy, India, as research ground, Inter 3 investigated new technological environments inhabited by traditional sensibilities and constructed an ecology of dreams, rituals and machines, a place of celebration and tolerance between past and future.
-
Worlds from Words II
Semester 5 . Ecole Speciale d’Architecture . Paris
Space exploration is not only the field of military research and blockbuster films. It is also the arena to debate and experiment on how human-mankind can survive using limited resources and how species can live symbiotically. Potentially space architecture and the creation of artificial scenarios can contribute significantly to the progress of a better life on Earth.
The semester started speculating about the relation between artificial environments and the human body. For the final project students investigated life in space and the design of an architecture that responds to specific conditions and requirements in space. From sustainable visions to atmospheric spaces and unique material studies the final projects reflected the richness of architecture possibilities on Earth.
-
Worlds from Words I
Semester 6 . Ecole Speciale d’Architecture . Paris
Atelier Worlds from Words investigated extreme possibilities of cultural manifestation via the study of ritual objects and foreign territories. With a strong design focus Worlds from Words explored the merge of myths, artifacts and architectural spaces. By infusing fictional narratives and speculative attitude the work developed an experimental vein of architecture as a language of expression. The students were inspired by literature and represented their own narratives with elegant drawings and intricate physical models. Digital tools were used alongside alternative techniques of traditional modeling, painting and sculpting.
-
Productive Visions
Nothing is final, narratives are constantly rewritten.
A high-speed train gin factory, biomaterial laboratories, a publishing house nested in a paper recycling facility, a tea boutique, urban bread networks, an ink memoir landscape in the London Docks, micro-productive squatting workshops, unpackaging shipyards, a 24/7 urban farm, symbiotic trash fields with family allotments in London’s East End – these are some of the projects developed as part of this year’s ‘Productive Visions’ agenda. In a unit led by design research, students have assembled their own programmes based on local findings and stories, personal interests and creative discipline. Navigating between literary fictions and building literals, the projects deliver insights into public imaginations while addressing the urgency of constructing a rich and intricate actual environment.
-
Narrating Infrastructures
Can extremes of programmatic effectiveness blend with the fragility of human habitat?
Inter 3 explores, via a strong design-oriented agenda, the crossbreeding of industrial landscape and architecture. A series of infrastructural interventions are studied and mapped through different times and places to understand their colossal (at times stressful) contribution to human and natural habitats, and to find ways to connect them with architecture and the city to create new urban scripts. Last year subterranean film-sets, waste-processing sites and urban farms were some of the means we used to approach contemporary issues from an interdisciplinary architectural stance.
