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Architectural Association Intermediate Unit 12

Isolated but ConnectedExtended Brief 2017/2018 Non-city 2017, A Geometry Office

Intermediate 12

Isolated but Connected

Archizoom’s No-Stop City prophecy is realized.

The world is one continuous network of logistic fluxes with production seamlessly irrigating consumption, information saturating our attention, flooding the ever-growing number of devices surrounding us with increasing temptation for advertisement and surveillance.

The modern metropolis is increasingly built from faceless extrusions of stacked volumes of space and capital. Glass, steel and concrete are organised as efficiently as possible to form a commercially optimal machine for living and working1. With today’s cities amplifying all the least favourable attributes of the Anthropocene and witnessing a growing interest in virtual reality and tech-fuelled, self-sustainable lifestyles, they could soon become endangered resorts of co-habitation. While a direct critique of the homogenised city would constitute a valid brief, Intermediate 12 will rather imagine its antidote – an extreme urban sprawl to reclaim the land we occupy.

1 Recently Rem Koolhaas’ AMO effectively showed this in a collage, placing together side by side images of identical skyscrapers from Germany, China, Switzerland, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia and so on. This image was part of a research for an exhibition titled “Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014” for Venice Biennale, reminding us that the global cities we build are becoming more and more similar to each other.

Architectural AssociationIntermediate 12Introduction

Intermediate Unit 12 is directed by Taneli Mansikkamäki and Max Turnheim. The unit investigates the coexistence of country side and wireless lifestyles. Projects that are created within the unit framework are rooted in presence. Methods of the unit are strategic and tactical of addressing our underlying need to engage with the social problems and the preservation of global resources and overconsumption.

Typical Vernacular Sauna in Finland

Anonymous Nature, Max Turnheim 2016

Intermediate 12

‘The surest way to rise above prejudice, and to judge of things in their true relations, is to put ourselves in the place of an isolated man.’—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or Treatise on Education, 1762

To test the above hypothesis of isolation, we will travel and speculate on dwellings within a remote site located in the Finnish landscape. The year will culminate on a collective 1:1 wood structure in the same location. Along our collective energy we will put our software and scanners to work and test how technology will help us to record the landscape but also to construct within it. As the site is not connected to services we will use solar panels to give power to our batteries. This cohabitation of technology and vast wilderness has had a strong presence in the Finnish culture and explains the birth and popularisation of mobile technologies in this surprising context.

In 1987, one man made a phone call between Helsinki and Moscow. He made this call on a handheld device. This man was no other than Mikhail Gorbachev.

While the content of the call is unknown, we have photographs of the communication and know what geographical locations it connected. Finland (independent from Russia since the soviet revolution) was in technologically driven contact with the communist super-state. We can see this event as a stepping-stone towards the collapse of a bi-polar world. The device was a Mobira Cityman produced by Nokia.

Nokia, while the roots of the company can be traced to the mid-1800s, started making rubber boots by the turn of the 20th century responding to the necessity of coping with the harsh local climate of Finland. The local risk of being stranded in the snowy landscape then became the justification for investing in telecommunications, which would lead to Nokia’s dominant position in the cellphone market until 2007 and the omnipresence of its familiar ringtone triggering generalized ancient reptilian reflexes in human brains.

Finland became covered with an analogue mobile network as one of the first places in the world in the 1980s and since then it has been in the forefront of the design and development of mobile systems, networks, services and devices. Contrary to the above high tech development it has also kept a distinctive relationship to the

Mobira Cityman, Nokia Connecting People 1987

French Eagle being trained to capture rogue drones 2017


Intermediate 12

respective rubber boots together with recreational berry and mushroom picking. Technology is widely seen as giving means to allow people to work more efficiently, better and ultimately – less. Technology should allow people to retreat, to make more time available for relaxation, cultural activities and recreational activities.

This local cultural shift can easily be seen as a prelude for the wider conversation happening internationally surrounding future of work 2. How production and technology will change over the next decades. We witness news and articles showing examples how artificial intelligence will eventually replace not only the supermarket tills but also the immaterial labour. Software can suddenly produce symphonies3.

2 See AI Music, British tech startup working in between artificial intelligence and music

3 Srnicek, WIlliams: Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

The Contemporary Dwelling

For the year 2017-2018 Intermediate 12 will be working with a singular dwelling which was also the central theme of the discourse surrounding the development of modernism. We argue that the standardised dwelling and standardised office plan are extremely outdated and have been nourishing the environmental, social and political problems we are facing today. As architecture is sitting right in the middle of inherently political world we will not be able to avoid to the effects of it. Brexit, the shift to criticality towards (the free movement of) people, Grenfell Tower, rising fascist regimes and the age of Trump will all be reflected when we take our architecture back to the fundamental core of modernism and look at a single unit of habitation where it all started. To distinct ourselves from the modernist post-war architects who imagined the single unit as a building block for housing, city and then finally as a justification to be able to control the design of large urban territories, we will build and design in an isolated site in the country side. This should also give us enough distance to avoid the most direct effects of global capitalism, overconsumption and hopefully avoid also repeating the same mistakes as our modernist predecessors. We will work on the contemporary dwelling, in isolation.

Experimental House and Sauna, Muuratsalo – Alvar Aalto 1952-1953

Klas Eriksson – Forza Rosa Fluff, Isokyrö, Finland 2015


Intermediate 12

Architectural AssociationIntermediate 12Term 1

Hans Stofer – String Theory ST09, 2014

The City

Driven by simultaneous maximisation of local anchorage and a minimisation of ownership, we will start the year by creating our own ‘desert island discs’4 of architecture. Eight of our most essential belongings and favourite memories of the city will form a kit of parts – a disordered collection of things and an instrumental bricolage for understanding the importance and meaning of our environment. We will not set any limits to what we would consider valuable enough to be preserved and it is all down to the individual: sounds, tastes, smells, objects, views, architectural elements, garments…

In architectural context the above might raise questions about urban preservation or relevance of historical continuum, but in a different scale (and for us more importantly) it will address and question our consumption. What would you take away when fleeing a city? Is it necessary to own anything when everything can be printed, rented or streamed from a cloud? Could physical ownership of “things” be a remnant of the 20th century? What are the essentials of an interior space in a post-digital environment?

As Rousseau wrote about the importance of the isolation in relation to our understanding of the current environment we will extract our pieces of urban city with us to the fictional “desert island” and see if they loose or change the meaning in anyway by doing so.

After the initial workshops where you will learn about digitalisation: 3D scanning technologies, recorders and sound/video editing software. We will continue to a collaboration with goldsmiths to produce details from our collection of found objects and recordings. Jewellery historically has been treasured, kept close for long periods and then handed over generations to generations or buried with our body. This is how our desert island discs acting as a memory capsule of the city will start to be immortalized in physical form – by looking to the tradition of body adornments.

3 a Concept created by Roy Plomley in 1942 for a long standing BBC radio show where a guest is invited to choose eight records they would bring with them to a desert island

Intermediate 12

Conditions for Ornament no.4, Michael Rowe, 1988


Intermediate 12

This metal workshop will start also our expedition towards Gesamtkunstwerk5. By the end of the term you will have an interior space and artefacts to support the skilfully narrated lifestyle in totality. Architecture around the designed dwelling unit will be brought to basics to balance the complexity of all the software we have become so dependent on. We will speculate on the spatial arrangements of the new environments for living, working and cultivation which are situated in an increasingly automated society where the proximity to saturated urban centres have become truly questionable.

In the end of the Term 1 a unit trip to Finland will give us hopefully a snowy ending to the year. We will arrange a seminar in the Culture Sauna6 to plunder and prescribe the longing of leaving and the meaning of exit. We will continue the journey towards north and survey the isolated but connected site. We will see some examples of sustainable houses and talk with people who have chosen alternative living and working conditions. Also Architect Alvar Aalto’s house, studio and a experimental house in the woods will be on the list of visits.

We will stopover on the site to survey it by taking considered photographs and accurate measurements. You will learn methods of digitally reading complex natural geometries, calculating distances and defining ground conditions. Important side note regarding the ownership of land is that in theory there are no limits where one can go as with the ‘Everyman’s rights’ legislation in Finland, it allows people to move around freely and habit temporarily practically any land whether it is private or public.

5 Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art” was a term from Richard Wagner to describe the reunification of the arts. He argued that the arts had fallen apart in Antiquity together with the Athenian Polis. For Wagner the unification meant also full control of his operas which has inspired many after such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier in the field of modernist architecture.

6 Kulttuurisauna is a public sauna by Tuomas Toivonen and Nene Tsuboi in Helsinki which is a contemporary mixed-use building, also working as a setting for educational activities and an architectural studio

View of a half frozen lake in Isokyrö, Finland

Mall Grab EP cover, a Contemporary clash of icons, cultures and meanings


Intermediate 12


Waterline Museum, a Wall tracing topography by Anne Holtrop Studio

Above: Shoji Construciton RIght: Playscapes model by Isamu Noguchi, 1970s

The Landscape

The year 2018 will start by modelling and materialising the landscape studies from the fieldtrip to Finland in Hooke Park. Working with casting, metal and woodwork. Draping and reshaping the landscape. Working on individual strategies of managing the dwellings not anymore in isolation but together with the observations and notes from the site investigations. You will be growing the projects into strong individual proposals which instead of formalising criticism towards the urban condition will propose alternatives by taking position and reflecting the social, political and environmental issues of our time.

The green technologies which are marketed as a profit making or money saving products might not make the most interesting research subject but rather concentrating on employing individual tactics and widening our understanding to combat the global geopolitical issues might be more fruitful. As the fusion of the digital environments and nature might potentially result in a disastrous muddle we believe that simple architectural gestures can support these complex contexts and the future dwelling possibilities.

These post-digital spaces will be designed together with the landscapes they occupy and the individual dwellings and their spaces become curated lifestyles of their occupants instead of merely containers of their valuables. We will experiment with dividing spaces as kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and living room might be replaced by an online room and an offline room connected by a corridor for growing crops.

It is the ethos of the unit to work in parallel with available analogue techniques and digital tools and mix these two effortlessly together. We will be introduced to the latest physical modelling technologies and experiment with combining these with more analogue traditional crafts.

The architecture we believe in has a real relationship to a specific place, takes into consideration the available raw materials and natural habitat but with using the latest technologies to experiment and build with. Sustainable technologies, economics of the country side or digital “smart” construction might give the third year students an interesting base for their technical studies submission.

Inuit woodcarvings are functional maps depicting the local coastlines

Sectional Drawing of Pezo House

Japanese structure for obstructing landslides

Intermediate 12

1:1 Coexistence

We continue to work in the last term with the individual proposals and strategies but also we will introduce an idea of a 1:1 prototype responding to the site that could be tested in practice. After all the snow has melted and the waters are warmer we will be able to construct and document our ideas on site. We will go back to Finland and collectively design and build an intervention out of timber which will relate the research of the second term to the context. This workshop will be the culmination of the year and it will serve also as a vehicle to communicate our collective research to the wider community locally and globally.

As an outcome of the third term you will be looking to create compositions by taking detailed photographs of 1:20 scale models set in a landscape/context. In addition to these large-scale models, we will be working with triptychs including detailed drawings and images that describe a place and the project in relation to time, atmosphere and context. By bringing together sound, video or photography, physical and digital models, we will research the possibility of projects becoming speculative and layered architectural instances.

Architecten de Vylder Vinck Taillieu, The Huik HousePlayscapes model by Isamu Noguchi, 1970s


Intermediate 12

Reading

Andrews, Max (Editor) LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook RSA 2006Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe W. Taylor 1719Easterling, Keller Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space Verso Books 2014Firestone, Shulamith The Two Modes of Cultural History 1970Koolhaas, Rem S, M, L, XL Monacelli 1995Mackay, Robin (Editor) When Site Lost the Plot Urbanomic 2015Murphy, Douglas Last Futures Verso Books 2016Negarestani, Reza Torture Concrete: Jean-Luc Moulene and the Protocol of Abstraction Sequence Pres 2014Pottmann, Helmut Architectural Geometry Bentley Institute 2007Suutari, Warza (eds) Finnish Landscape Garret Publications 2017Steenbergen, Clemens Composing Landscapes: Analysis, Typology and Experiments for Design Birkhäuser 2008Srnicek, Nick & Williams, Alex Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work Verso Books 2015Ursprung, Philip (Editor) Herzog and de Meuron: Natural History Lars Muller 2005

Architectural AssociationIntermediate 12References

Listening

Amnesia Scanner As Angels Rig Hook 2015BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs 1942-Debussy, Claude Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune 1894 Glass, Philip Itaipu 1989Herzog, Werner Burden of Dreams, Commentary 1982 Schaeffer, Pierre Étude aux chemins de fer 1948

Intermediate 12

Architectural AssociationExtended Brief DraftTimetable

2017 -‐ 2018 AA INTERMEDIATE 12 PROGRAMMERev. A

TERM 1 TERM 2 TERM 3MONTH September October November December January February March April May JuneDATE 26 27 2 5 9 12 13 16 19 23 26 30 2 6 9 13 16 20 23 27 30 4 7 11 14 8 11 15 18 22 25 29 1 5 8 12 15 19 22 26 1 5 8 12 15 19 22 23 26 30 3 7 10 14 17 21 24 28 31 4 7 11 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11 WEEK 12 WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11 WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9TUE WED MON THU MON THU FRI MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU FRI SAT SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI

Admin, Reviews and JuriesUnit Presentation/InterviewsOfficial Assessment Progress rev Fri PRE 2nd PRE 3rd 24th TS3 TABL 2nd TABLES 3rd YR External ExamJuries and pinups Pinup JURY Pinup JURY JURYOpen Day/Week OPEN WEEKExhibition Build Exhibition design and building PR

Student Design Tasks Discs DWGs+IMGs Small Scale Piece Materials DWG+IMG Models DWG+IMG Development Site Modelling terrainThematics Preservation, Over consumption Countryside, Isolation Digital platforms Defining Strategy Individual Project Development + TS for 3rd Years Common Project Final Images PortfolioTRIPSFinland 12.-‐17.12 FIN FINLANDFranceDorset Hooke ParkHolland 13.-‐15.10WorkshopsGoldsmith RW 6x METALSDesert Island Discs TM RECORDING 6x EDITING Rendering MT IMGSeminarsCultural Ecology TM Exodus MK ExodusTechnology and Politics MTTutorialsTaneli Mansikkamaki

Max Turnheim

GUESTSMartti KallialaJenna SutelaUmberto Bellardi RicciHans StoferRicarda WolfSari Räthel

UNIT TRIPSHOLLAND, GERMANY Dusseldorf: Museum Insel Hombroich, Krefeld: Museums Haus Lange Haus Esters, Nijmegen: gallery MarzeeDORSET Hooke Park, AA WorkshopFINLAND 1 Wintertrip to finland before christmas, site visit, Aalto house, atelje, experimental house etc.FINLAND 2 Summertrip to site, Common Building Project

2017 -‐ 2018 AA INTERMEDIATE 12 PROGRAMMERev. A

TERM 1 TERM 2 TERM 3MONTH September October November December January February March April May JuneDATE 26 27 2 5 9 12 13 16 19 23 26 30 2 6 9 13 16 20 23 27 30 4 7 11 14 8 11 15 18 22 25 29 1 5 8 12 15 19 22 26 1 5 8 12 15 19 22 23 26 30 3 7 10 14 17 21 24 28 31 4 7 11 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11 WEEK 12 WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11 WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9TUE WED MON THU MON THU FRI MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU MON THU FRI SAT SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI

Admin, Reviews and JuriesUnit Presentation/InterviewsOfficial Assessment Progress rev Fri PRE 2nd PRE 3rd 24th TS3 TABL 2nd TABLES 3rd YR External ExamJuries and pinups Pinup JURY Pinup JURY JURYOpen Day/Week OPEN WEEKExhibition Build Exhibition design and building PR

Student Design Tasks Discs DWGs+IMGs Small Scale Piece Materials DWG+IMG Models DWG+IMG Development Site Modelling terrainThematics Preservation, Over consumption Countryside, Isolation Digital platforms Defining Strategy Individual Project Development + TS for 3rd Years Common Project Final Images PortfolioTRIPSFinland 12.-‐17.12 FIN FINLANDFranceDorset Hooke ParkHolland 13.-‐15.10WorkshopsGoldsmith RW 6x METALSDesert Island Discs TM RECORDING 6x EDITING Rendering MT IMGSeminarsCultural Ecology TM Exodus MK ExodusTechnology and Politics MTTutorialsTaneli Mansikkamaki

Max Turnheim

GUESTSMartti KallialaJenna SutelaUmberto Bellardi RicciHans StoferRicarda WolfSari Räthel

UNIT TRIPSHOLLAND, GERMANY Dusseldorf: Museum Insel Hombroich, Krefeld: Museums Haus Lange Haus Esters, Nijmegen: gallery MarzeeDORSET Hooke Park, AA WorkshopFINLAND 1 Wintertrip to finland before christmas, site visit, Aalto house, atelje, experimental house etc.FINLAND 2 Summertrip to site, Common Building Project

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