COMPETITION

Environment

Alain Pilote wrote on an article published in 1994 that reality – the environment – is sacrificed for the symbol – money. And what about all the artificial needs created for the sole purpose of keeping people employed? What about all the paper work and red tape that requires the need for a lot of people, packed in office buildings? What about goods manufactured in order to last as short as possible, in the aim of selling more of them? All that leads to the useless waste and destruction of the natural environment.

Searching alternatives to the ongoing capitalist system, it’s impossible no to think on how it leads and affects environmental issues. Oil energy, water and waste are conducted by economical forces beyond its geopolitical, social, economic and infrastructural implications. The cycle of extraction, production and recycling has demonstrated to be a failed system and some of the worst environmental disasters in the past years are related with industrial models and the micro-politics of economic power. At this point and with the access to information and digital tools, the response to environmental issues have reached the masses to enable new models, ideas and innovative proposals. Thus, it’s worth to think which can be the architectural response to the emerging conditions presented by climate-changed terrains?

Keywords: Waste, water, ships graveyards, environment, post-oil city, environmental disasters.

by Guest Curators of the MONEY Cycle, Ethel Baraona Pohl and Cesar Reyes Najera

Keller Easterling juror of the Environment competition in Think Space MONEY Cycle from Think Space on Vimeo.

 

 

Environment Competition Brief

Keller Easterling

Subtraction

Consider the pleasures of building removal. Whatever the prodigious efforts associated with erecting architecture, the art of causing it to disappear can be equally violent, compelling or satisfying.

Methods for demolishing, imploding or otherwise subtracting building material are not among the essential skills imparted to architects in training. Believing building to be the primary constructive activity, the discipline has not institutionalized special studies of subtraction. In fact, for architects, building envelope is almost always the answer to any problem, and subtraction is often understood to be the preparation of a tabula rasa.

In the often indifferent ecologies of building subtraction, marketers, financial experts, planners and politicians man several different kinds of remote controls that can detonate building and landscape creating destruction and political disenfranchisement in ways that are only somewhat slower than warfare. This subtraction generally signals loss while accumulation or accretion generally signals growth.

But every act of building is already an act of subtraction. Most buildings today are designed as repeatable spatial products with rapid cycles of obsolescence. Financial industries surround the seemingly static and durable building with a volatile balloon of inflating and deflating value, be it a small house, a massive sports stadium or a 4000-room casino. Populations migrate into and away from cities causing both rapid growth and rapid decline. Buildings subtract other building because they replace a previous structure but they can also, just by their often toxic presence, cause surrounding buildings and landscapes to tumble to the ground.

In the wake of recent crises, catastrophes and population shifts, as buildings turn over and radiate negativity, a significant portion of the heavy machinery used to construct buildings is also now busy taking them apart. Ruin and decay has its own pornography. Demolition has its own TV shows. Disassembly and teardown are now popular art forms. The newest approaches to building removal even appear to retract skyscrapers into the ground. Finally, it is easy to see, with half closed eyes, an accelerated time lapse, like harvest and cultivation,within which large swaths of building and landscape seem to be simultaneously built and unbuilt—an economy wheresubtraction is the other half of building.

Bringing its own aesthetic pleasures, subtraction tutors an enhanced repertoire of form-making and opens onto a redoubled territory of endeavor. Space making through clearing is one pleasure. Still, subtraction is not simply absence but a moment in a set of exchanges and advances, aggressions and attritions.

Building subtraction, as a heavy industry and a design protocol, is an emergent lucrative enterprise, a source of employment and a political instrument of extrastate governance. A subtraction protocol might be appropriate in many parts of the world where, for instance, sprawling overdevelopment has attracted distended or failed markets, where development confronts environmental issues, where development would be wise to retreat from exhausted land or flood plains, or where special land preserves are valued for attributes that development disrupts.

A subtraction economy may mark the end of an era within which building is treated primarily as financial instrument. While there areelaborate schemes for manipulating the virtual values of buildings and landscapes—in real estate markets or carbon markets—there are fewer spatial variables of value. Materializing risks and rewards in a physical, spatial constructs, shares and mechanisms in an alternative portfolio of values can be traded in an parallel market. Active forms can be designed as spatial levers, ratchets or offsets in this market. These negotiations can stabilize, compete with or even overwhelm financial markets to grow, contract or erase development.

Financial systems are good at haphazardly deleting building and landscape, but since architects have been trained to make the building machine lurch forward, they may know something about how to put it into reverse.

Competition Dates

Launch 28 February 2014
Submission Deadline 10 April 2014
Results Announcement 6 May 2014

Eligibility

Professionals and students in architecture and related fields are eligible to participate in Think Space 2013|2014 MONEY cycle. We are promoting and welcoming interdisciplinary approach and whoever feels capable of submiting the entry that complies with the competition requirements is eligible to aply. 

Registration

Registration is only possible through the official competition website here and it is free of charge. It serves to indicate your interest in this competition and allows you to login. Upon the registration proceedure and logging in, you will be at liberty to enter the submission procedure. 

Requirements

A complete list of the required subimission documents is avaliable here. 

Fees

Early Bird Fee  | 375 HRK | 50 EUR | from 28 February 2014 to 28 March 2014 |
Late Bird Fee  | 565 HRK | 75 EUR | from 29 March to 10 April 2014 | 
Package Fee | 1125 HRK | 150 EUR  | competition + Unconference |

After completing payment proceedure, you may submit your entry here.

JUROR

Keller Easterling

Keller Easterling is an architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University. Her book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) researches familiar spatial products  in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. A previous book Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Matrix Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. An excerpt from Extrastatecraft can be found on Design Observer (http://places.designobserver.com/feature/zone-the-spatial-softwares-of-extrastatecraft/34528/). An ebook excerpt from Extrastatecraft, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk, was also recently published by Strelka Press. Easterling has lectured, published and exhibited her work in the United States and internationally.