Advanced Design Studio, Pasquarelli

Want Not, Waste Not

Towards a reconciliation of yesterday’s iconic hallucinations and today’s infrastructural sobriety

“What hope is there for sustainability when conspicuous consumption holds all the cards for pleasure?” - Wendy Steiner

The Setup

In the wake of the global economic crisis and the subsequent promise of revitalizing stimulus funds, architectural discourse has proven itself to be quite pliable. Witness the rise of the icon as a unifying disciplinary interest. Steeped in wealth and excess our preoccupation with the singular formal gestures of the icon imploded in concert with the global markets. Predictably, the discipline turned about face, following the money from monumental formalism to the supposedly subservient functionalism of infrastructure. But is the distinction between the excess of the icon and the environmental-efficiency of infrastructure conclusive? This studio aims to challenge this false dichotomy by advancing a catalog of pragmatic utopias that imagine a form of sustainability enabled by leisure and pleasure rather than sacrifice.

The Pleasure Principle

To interrogate this inversion of architectural interest, the studio will consider the notion of “industrial ecology”. Coined only 20 years ago to describe a subcategory of infrastructure that forges closed-loop, cyclical and symbiotic relationships between consumption and production, industrial ecology attempts to situate waste as commodity. As a polemical concept it boldly proposes that excess is a form of resourcefulness; that a hedge to our resource crisis is ironically to indulge in consumption.

Though the field of industrial ecology primarily addresses material flows at the scale of oil refineries and coal power plants, for the sake of this studio it will serve as a provocation to consider novel urban scenarios that result from the dense, closed-loop dependencies of economy and ecology, production and consumption, leisure and landfill. Normally considered ‘weak form’ in the service of established programs, infrastructure in this case will instead instigate new behaviors and provoke novel programmatic hybrids.

The studio will not pursue a single prescribed building type. Instead, students will hypothesize symbiotic relationships between programs of leisure (shopping, recreation, entertainment), work (industrial production, farming), and infrastructure (waste management, energy harvesting) to create self-sustaining feedback loops of supply and demand. These relationships will be tested at multiple scales, addressing architectural form as well as urban organization. Design decisions will be calibrated by the performance demands of specific infrastructures.

Although the dominant ideology of industrial ecology is "sustainability" and its primary tool technological expertise, it is not the intent of the studio to save the world or act solely as engineers. Instead the nature of our investigations will be speculative.

The Procedure

These experiments will play out in the city of Rio de Janeiro. From the inward expansion of its coastline into the Bay of Guanabara to the ungoverned outward sprawl of its favelas, Rio is a proving ground of urban experimentation. The studio will capitalize on the city’s legacy of pleasure (despite its poverty and radical class disparities) investigating the tabula rasa design of Roberto Burle-Marx's Flamengo Park. Similarly, the studio will learn from the intentions and outcomes of Brazil’s greatest contribution to degree-zero urbanism, the experiment of Brasilia. Framed by these projects, the studio will continue Rio’s project of coastal land reclamation on a site adjacent to an obsolete port facility. This ‘blank slate’ site, akin to the artificial islands of the UAE, will provide a territory free of context and history. With this freedom, sustainability will not act as a band-aid to mend broken systems, but will be provoke new conceptions of the city – a potential model for an emerging next century economy.

The extraordinary amount of work required to successfully complete this studio necessitates that students work in teams of two to develop their proposals. All students are expected to use digital modeling, sketching, diagramming, digital fabrication, rendering, drawing, and physical model building with equal emphasis. The first three weeks of the semester will be dedicated to researching Brazil, eco-industrial parks, and more general systems of material symbiosis to understand their parameters and opportunities. This research will form a body of shared knowledge for the studio from which each pair of students will develop a hypothesis regarding material, economic, and programmatic dependencies. In the fourth week the studio will travel to Brazil, visiting Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.