ARC3020Y F
Instructor: Petros Babasikas
Meeting Section: L9104
Synchronous
Tuesdays, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

This Research Studio reconsiders the Archipelago as a model for drawing and making architecture against limit conditions within and beyond a contemporary city.

Focusing on specific urban and marine (city-sea) territories made up of diverse yet common islands, settlements and commons, the studio engages them under the lens of a real institution actively engaged in their stewardship.

Free Agents

These organizations (or agents) respond to urgent, invisible issues of climate and cultural crisis and the decline of the commons. They enhance indigenous networks and identities within islands and territories; they deploy tactical and scientific expertise to produce solutions-based, small-scale and high-impact interventions.

City/Sea

The institutions/organizations, urban and marine territories, islands, settlements and commons form an Archipelago: a complex mesh of spatial, environmental and political relations challenging standard definitions of site-, user-, or client-based architecture.

Marine and urban, these Archipelagos challenge the architect to co-author a series of design partnerships, new rules of engagement for mapping (and stewardship) of islands and territories, and protocols of rehabilitation (and design) of new settlements and sanctuaries.

Diffusion / Civitas

An Archipelago is made up of island identities against expanding totalities. It contains enclaves of civitas against urbanization, states of exception opposing the diffusion of the public sphere; it nurtures politics as well as economics.¹ An Archipelago emerges from divided cities or contested territories. It is a long-standing projective model for architects and urbanists including K.F.Schinkel, E.May, O.M.Ungers, R.Koolhaas and P.V.Aureli.

¹See Pier Vittorio Aureli,”Toward the Archipelago.” Log No. 11 (Winter 2008), 91-120.

Relationality / Resistance

Beyond urban multi-centrality, the Archipelago model has also driven thinkers of non-linear history, interconnectedness and hybridity, extra-statecraft, island studies, post-colonialism and the Anthropocene like G. Deleuze, E. Glissant, K. Easterling, D. Harraway and T. Morton. This Archipelago is political, further iterfacing with contemporary practices of cross-border architecture, incremental or participatory housing, commoning and environmental conservation.

Settlement / Sanctuary

Our year-long Research Studio will actively pursue the Archipelago model via drawing and research through making – not merely recording it as a given structure, but inventing it as a mesh of infrastructures, human and animal migrations, topographies and hydrographies, pressure points and exchange zones. Our goal will be to invest architectural identity in objects and fields, investigate versions of resilience, enhance commons, produce new sanctuaries, design settlements and housing.

Research Studio 1 will explore possible partnerships, rules of engagement and design, rehabilitation, and re-use across a series of islands and territories in Greece and in Canada, via the lens of independent institutions actively engaged in their stewardship. Potential territories include distinct settlements in Athens and Toronto; a group of Islands in the Icarian Sea; and Manitoulin Island. Possible organizations include a Public Cultural Agency, an Institute for Marine Conservation and a Housing Co-Op. Students will work in teams and individually, selecting one of the above territories/institutions, always comparing their work of others. They will produce an Atlas (a book of maps, drawings, rules of engagement, speculative travelogue and/or manual of sanctuaries and settlements) and a short Film.

Research Studio II will continue its design investigations by proposing a design program for new Commons, Settlements and Sanctuaries for the specific institutions and territories.

Travel

An optional studio trip to Athens, Samos and the Icarian Sea including on-site seminar sessions with selected institutions will be scheduled as a conclusion to the course, in late April 2021, COVID-19 restrictions permitting.