Architectural Design V-IX: Museum Format (GD A. Antonakakis)

Abstract

The studio investigates a contemporary version of a cabin with an “extended bed” and a field understood as a different public realm. These two architectural conditions even if still unnamed, show already existing tensions of the social sphere produced while different relations occur between users and the network.

Objective

The aim of this workshop is to articulate the team position and some responses in relation to this description of the current social phenomena. Sociality is represented here as a function of isolated cabins in a common but uncanny social living room. This common field is also consumed as a space of the infrastructure.

Content

The studio investigates a contemporary version of a cabin with an "extended bed" and a field understood as a different public realm. These two architectural conditions even if still unnamed, show already existing tensions of the social sphere produced while different relations occur between users and the network. The cabin and the field to be designed is also the design of oneself stabilized in front of the network. Both the cabin and the field in which it is included become increasingly visible while massive populations of different categories move, while people's lives relate to shifting environments, and while people increasingly inhabit temporary spaces. They show two conditions related to this instability in a strange way; somehow they capture something stable in the realm of this instability; they crystallize body poses in front of the individual spectacles provided by the network. Intentions of the studio and tensions of the current social sphere The aim of this workshop is to articulate the team position and some responses in relation to this description of the current social phenomena. Sociality is represented here as a function of isolated cabins in a common but uncanny social living room. This common field is also consumed as a space of the infrastructure. This social field functions as depending on the network and as an extension of it. It is named for the working hypothesis of this studio the "infrastructure village"; and the purpose of the "infrastructure village" is to install an imaginary relation with unexisting locations where humans find a meaning to spend their time. Related or not to "real" locations and pragmatic backgrounds, "Elsewhere" -a non-place beyond the bed-desc-position is proposed as the banality of this common field (where the exotic seems to play a significant normalizing role). Elsewhere is a key element for the structure of the post-network "cell of interconnected domesticity". It is the ever transposed core of the cabin and the field; and this continuous transposition is viewed as a dramatic emptiness. A study of the evolution of ‘modern domesticity’ in architecture, the meanings of its microscale and its expansions, will lead to representation and transformations of the material studied. A few numbers of examples will lead the research. Domesticity had an important role in shaping modern architecture; the rationalization of the city is related to expansive forms of the domestic. Modern domestic settings drove to transformations of the urban landscape. A different domesticity can be presented as already forming city cells and common fields that push the urban phenomena to radical transformations. Formal, material and social experimentation touch the social and political imaginary that could shape a different urban reality. This shaping is not exempt from a certain theatricality. This study is organized both allegorically and literally, elaborating material in a practical and a theoretical level; it is introduced as an inhabitable set design where many performances can take place. The stability of the "infrastructure village" is so different from Aldo Rossi’s "scena fissa" (stable scene). Research and Proposals The studio will first research on issues and produce settings for extended beds included in more or less open cabins. Designing extended bed surfaces instead of homes is the first part of the research. In a second parallel level, a living common field of a larger scale is asked to be designed, in immediate relation to the individual cabins and with the possibility to host common activities of diverse kinds. Experimental formats of presentation could include dioramas, animated drawings, models, videos, axos, and vector images and books including the produced material and texts. After the choice of an existing semi - abandoned site a projection of the remarks will be done to complete the investigation. Finding a site is a first important research.

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