26/03/2007 - 06/04/2007

Experimental Urbanism

Closing Party: Friday 6th April, 6-10pm

Diploma unit 13 at the Architectural Association explores architecture as the construction of artificial environments and the distortion of local climate and temporality. The unit attempts to map the manifestation and exchange of energy, and design for its reallocation and redistribution, dealing with it synaesthetically across a range of scales and spectrums.

Dip13 probes the intersection between the body and the city in pursuit of socio-environmental polemics and spatial performances. This year we speculate on the possibilities of generating an experimental urbanism from an architecture relating environmentally to the body. The unit adopts the ambitious but unlikely brief set by the city of Monaco to extend its waterfront within a sustainable agenda.

Our inhabitation of the E:vent Gallery will focus on built and virtual simulations and tests of the various environmental effects currently under research, whether establishing the extreme limits of the thermal and humidity comfort zone according to activity, utilizing the space as a metabolic regime for maintaining fitness, creating spaces for sweating and shopping, gradient fields of darkness and light, or filtration mechanisms for storing and transferring energy.