Tuesday 29 September 2009

The Hybrid Home

Using both analogue and digital processes we seek to explore a time-based architecture, an architecture that is designed in four dimensions. The unit aims to develop an awareness of temporal, narrative architectures using film, photography and motion graphics to communicate a relationship of human interaction, experience and occupation.

This year Unit H will investigate the idea of the home as a hybrid space; in negotiation with its environment, its landscape, weather and other processes. We will explore the possibilities for developing a new architecture of the home that might respond and change in relation to light and weather.

As light can be either natural or artificial, so weather now also has its own 'manufactured' elements, i.e. the electromagnetic smog of mobile phones, wireless and other telematic devices. Landscapes defined by human intervention, where once inhospitable environments were made arable and habitable, are now threatened by the consequences of large-scale engineering, extreme weather patterns, changes in rainfall and rising sea-levels. Unit H will explore new architectural propositions that embrace extreme weather and the changing climate both natural and man-made.

We are interested in examining the ways in which architectural space, drawn space and film space combine, collide, inform and reconfigure one another. The processes of use within an architectural experience will be explored so that we can begin to understand immaterial/intangible architectures, the spaces ‘in between’ the buildings; the atmospheric and ephemeral within the tactile and tectonic.

Shard Houses, by Lebbeus Woods
Lebbeus Woods, "Shard Houses"

thumbnail market day handout for The Hybrid Home