Architectural Association – Diploma Unit 9

Pantopia

The unit continued to expose territorial and institutional crises. Through spatial diagnostics and multi-scaled architectural strategies, the unit will advocate for territorial transformations and institutional adjustments. As spatial crises are numerous and complex, we will focus our attention on those related to ‘economies of life’.

If our fossil-fuelled economies consume and exhaust common resources, the economies of life nurture and enhance them; they include those of care, culture, and resource management. Most trends indicate that we must live in ever-growing cities supplied by an ever-intensifying countryside, yet this polar acceleration has produced an imbalance in which large swathes of our territories are overlooked, uncared for and abandoned. DIP9 posits that somewhere between robotic AI farming and smart-ish cities lies another territorial paradigm on which to implement economies of life and reimagine forms of societal, economic, and environmental occupation. This paradigm, a third territorial attractor, must be reclaimed, designed, and fiercely defended.

Our ambition is two-fold. First, we will study the current architectural forms and territorial organisations of these economies of life, critically positioning ourselves vis-a-vis ongoing and future policies. Second, we will design architectural strategies that adapt, transform, relocate, or create economies of life, establishing a network of units through mobility and connectivity to articulate the third territorial attractor.

We will respond to much needed questions of collective responsibility towards our environment with projects that mediate between territories, institutions, and citizens. Spatial crises have far-reaching consequences for how we live and occupy space that need to be urgently diagnosed, confronted, and responded to.