Architectural Design IV: Space of Accumulation

Abstract

What will the storage space of tomorrow look like?Designing a project in four steps:1. Envisioning scenarios about the future of storage and accumulation.2. Design of a spatial system to the scenario.3. Translating the system into an architectural structure in recycled construction materials.4. Developing of the real project.

Objective

Develop an independent, responsible and visionary attitude to a current social issue using the medium of (plan) collages. Ability to critically read and discuss (architectural) theoretical texts and relate them to the question. Developing an independent project that is coherent in terms of urban planning, typology and form, which deals constructively with the topic of reuse and is presented by means of primarily models.

Content

Accumulation describes the gradual gathering of elements. It is the law by which many great things operate, such as civilization, history, economy and not least the formation of planets. Architecture is also subject to the law of accumulation, as buildings do not appear in an instant, but are gradually put together on the building site. What are the pyramids if not an accumulation of stones? One possible answer would be to say that they are storage; an architectural response to accumulation as old as time itself. Is the traditional storage still valid today? What can spaces of accumulation mean for architecture? With the increased focus on accumulation of capital, goods and data in today’s society, you’d think that spaces of accumulation would be an essential part of our daily lives. Instead it is suspiciously missing from the public imagination, hidden away as some-thing necessary but unsightly. It’s true that the complexity and scale of accumulation can be unnerving and as the saying goes: you don’t want to know how the sausage is made. Nevertheless, could it be necessary to understand the sausage for a sustainable future? In our studio, using the knowledge from the previous semester on the ideal storage, we will combine the ideal and the real in order to speculate about how recycling meets tomorrow’s space of accumulation, because we believe that answering the question about the accumulation of the future means implicitly linking architecture to the necessities and urgencies of the world to come.

Resources