Thematic Exhibition (2021): Architecture x Infrastructure

Thom Mayne and Morphosis propose three new infrastructural typologies that radically toggle between scalar, contextual, and socioeconomic forces that have shaped contemporary China. Each typology—a symbolic marker, a landscape continuum, and a micro dispersal—relates architecture as a newfound system for urban infrastructural growth. We ask the audience to peer into China's future: a future that uses architecture as infrastructure to capture a vastly complex, everchanging, and interconnected world.

This project proposes a visionary yet realizable intervention for the resilient future of Chicago, transforming 280km of existing tunnels and extensive built environments that lay beneath the city into renewable energy providers and livable spaces.

In this installation, the visitor can go inside the model to experience a new reality framed by its openings and enclosures and real-time vision and sound of the context, virtually transporting themselves to the space inside The Captain's House.

The idea of designing houses for specific family structures (there is a big variety) in specific sites may sound obvious, but the biggest part of the world designs housing projects as economical solutions, not human solutions.

Le KBNN is a ready-made that rethinks in our contemporary context Le Corbusier’s Cabanon. It reinterprets the original scheme with updated devices and materials. Its interior explores the different original scenarios through virtual situations of the 21st century.

The main elements from the metalframe structure of a 6×9 meters demountable house illustrate Jean Prouvé’s constructive philosophy, according to which furniture and buildings alike could be readily dismantled, moved about, and adapted. 

The Basic Services Unit proposes a prefabricated module that can be built in just 5 weeks and concentrates the sanitation infrastructure and the structure for growth. This allows a family to count with the minimum sanitary needs in 40 days.

By introducing a new agent—the rock-skin that mediates between ‘a fragment of the mountain’ and ‘a building block’—we seek to forge a new relationship between the city (material consumption) and the mountain (natural resources).

All surrounding merges in the reflection established by a floating plate, which also mirrors the rigorous structure, slightly disturbing the primary order. And so, pragmatism and instability meet each other to build mutable and powerful landscapes.

The Casa de Semillas (house of the seeds) is an indispensable element of every new community like the one the Ayllu Arariwakuna Project is putting in place. It is what allows these communities to be autonomous. Today the seed production of the world is controlled by few organisms, and its genetic biodiversity is dwindling.or worse, forbidden. It is our responsibility as seed keepers to preserve this biodiversity.

By entering a cylindrical space, the visitor gets a sensorial experience of the passing of time through four phases of the 24-hour day—morning, midday, evening and night.

In 1966, Peter Hall highlighted that Holland’s cities have grown so close together that they form one city: Randstad Holland. Indeed, the Randstad, which started as a ring of compact cities around a green heart, has now evolved into an uncontrollable diffuse city. 

Beyond the hallucinatory visions of our modernity, a possibility of redemption emerges here from the suggestive beauty of the images. In an era of excessive standardization and brutal search for profitability, we should aim at a world not only liveable but also desirable.

The quality of inhabiting is related to freedom. The freedom given by the possibility of spatial appropriation, independent from an epoch and with no functional imposition. Architecture is the art of permanence, a constant support, open to life and its evolution. 

Inspired by the traditional wood joinery, the system integrates the simplicity of ‘stacking’ with a ‘snapping’- induced interlocking system for the unique part-to-whole mechanism.

The landmark’s shape will allow the creation of an inside and outside space, inviting the visitor to turn around and enter the installation in order to discover the full project while having an architectural experience.

The photosynthetic iceberg represents the spectacular but fragile greenhouse landscape, while the floating UFO, the Unstopping Fabricated Oasis, represents transnational organic food corporations, the ghosts of eco-capitalism. 

And today, the Swiss-themed building code describes typical building elements that evoke certain associations with traditional Swiss building types.

It was necessary to proceed as fast as possible with the cleverest design able to build a bridge that will last forever. Like a clock, the round table presents the different moments of the process of design and construction that lasted less than 24 months. 

The Industrial Revolution was responsible for enormous technological progress, and yet at the same time it has ended in a global ecological crisis. The memorial commemorates the incredible achievements of the late-modern era, but also declares the death of its environmentally destructive linear modes of production and consumption.