| Beschreibung |
In the Architectural Design issue for December 1971, Superstudio, the Italian Design Agency, published ”Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas” — dystopian miniatures governed by ludicrous ideas — that were introduced as ”twelve visions of ideal cities, the supreme achievement of twenty thousand years of civilization, blood, sweat and tears; the final haven of Man in possession of Truth, free from contradiction, equivocation and indecision; totally and for ever replete with his own PERFECTION”. While clearly meant to entertain, they were also disturbing, and obviously wanted you to think further. In their ambivalence, Superstudio’s ”Cautionary Tales” give a good idea of the approach we will also be pursuing in this project.
We’ll be staging clashes of ideas and reality — this time of ideas to transform our cities in light of the manifold ways in which workplaces are changing. By analyzing existing patterns, amplifying weak signals and extrapolating them to their logical extremes, we’ll conceive our own dystopian miniatures. In other words: We’ll be telling ”(Cautionary) Tales of Disappearing Offices”.
We will explore some of the ideas floating around, or make up our own visions — but we won’t be complacently presenting these concepts as panaceas. Every remedy will turn into a poison if administered in abundance and without discretion. With this thought in mind, we will rather push our ideas to their limits and consider them as hypotheses offering incentives for further thought. Ideas give us something to dwell upon. Putting them to their extreme application will — hopefully — allow us to check their feasibility or desirability, or show their weaknesses.
What will become of cities if we seriously consider the impact of some of the predictions offered today? A decline in the demand for office buildings? Dwindling amount of business trips? People moving to the countryside? We are unable to actually forecast what will happen. But, based on the little information we have, we can still set up scenarios, as models to show ”what would happen if?”.
Along those lines, we will explore the impacts an idea may have if you trace the chain of dominos falling down and show the consequences of a chosen concept and its interaction with the workings of society at large. We thereby attempt to establish a method by which architects can contribute to political consulting, by doing what designers do best: using their imagination — to conceive dystopian miniatures (for which students are invited to select a specific site or context and a system that is affected by the questions of the disappearing office within a city of their choice).
The project will be supplemented by a compulsory seminar. In a reading group to go with the project, we will have a closer look at the ideas and methods we will employ. |
