AFTER TYPE CHAPTER 3:
DIDACTIC GEOGRAPHIES
Didactic Geographies is the third iteration of the AT Chapter series that seek to continue a deeper inquiry into the abstraction of typological behaviours and procedural processes - peering into other worlds and realities through game engines. Positioning infrastructural machine landscapes and climate change as a cultural idea, it asks what type of didactic and civic Imaginary Infrastructures could emerge through a critical interrogation of typological behaviours, gaming and worlding?
‘… finding the wilds beyond the machine, finding the gaps and cracks that create our other future.’1
This iteration positions infrastructural landscapes and climate change as a cultural idea that require alternative new environmental imagination beyond grass roofs, wind farms and solar panels. Primarily located in the peripheries of our metropolis, the “infrastructures that condition and construct our world have been rendered invisible to it. They are comfortably hidden away, unsung ‘monuments’ to an ‘environmental irresponsibility’ playing out at a terrifying scale.”2 They are central to the production of our urban environment but are largely ignored and forgotten.
The studio explored the potential of superimposing cultural and didactic agendas on these machine landscapes to heighten our awareness of their environmental contribution (or misappropriation?). The studio engaged with the abstraction and augmentation of architectural and urban typological behaviours as formal, spatial and compositional strategies to unravel new models of didactic infrastructural landscapes.
Beyond the speculative typological/procedural processes, the studio’s design development work foreground game engine based open-ended worlds as a possible new pictorial and architectural space of production and design to establish a new pipeline of designing to unearth new realities. This approach allows to, not only generate speculative architectural propositions, but also explore and design speculative fictional worlds that engage with contemporary concerns for the architecture to inhabit with the ambition to further design discourse and allow new thoughts of concerns and opportunities to surface. We utilised game engines to situate new possibilities, worlds and narratives for infrastructures that operate at the scale of architecture and geography within fictional/non-fictional scenarios intended to enable new architectural and environmental discourse.
This studio is not about the proposal of solutions but provocations and require deep imagination and courage to step into the rabbit hole. As design theorist Benjamin Bratton stated, “… so-called ‘industrial architecture’ may be where many of the most interesting technological and intellectual disciplinary problems are now situated, it has little prestige. Theoretically rich coffee-table books of best-in-class automated power plants, warehouses, megafarms etc are required.”3
AT3 STUDENTS: Kexin Cheng, Max Lewoshko-Fagan, Lily Jiang, Ho Kyeong Kim, Miles Pisani, Ashlee Pukk, Shaoxiong Guo, Yiming Guo, Shuhan Wang, Andre Wee, Kevin Ka Chun Yuen, Junhua Zhou
STUDIO LEADER: RMIT ARCHITECTURE ASSOCIATE LECTURER PATRICK MACASAET
1. Young, Liam. 2019. Liam Young keynote Dezeen Day. YouTube video, 53.26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4iPKIrD9RE
2. Odell, Jenny. 2013-2014. “Satellite Landscapes.” Jenny Odell webpage, November 22, 2020. https://www.jennyodell.com/satellite-landscapes.html
3. Bratton Benjamin. 2019. “Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene.” Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene 89, no. 1: 14-21.
Watch the AT3 Design Studio Ballot Presentation.