Disruptions: Architectures for Low-Energy Futures
Studio Theme
Disruptions is an architectural research and design studio that brings together multi-scalar investigations with speculative design proposals, opening up possible futures that respond to the contemporary depletion of resources, species, and ecosystems.
Testing the capacity to disrupt the high-intensity energy paradigm of previous decades, students explore low-carbon materials, architectures, and territories anchored in solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and tidal/wave energy. The studio combines expanded forms of these renewable energies in dialogue with the high-carbon energies of fossil fuels, which they are trying to disrupt. Historically, investigations and discussions on energy have focused on supply and demand as separate realms; here, students design spaces for energy production, conversion, storage, distribution, consumption, as well as the handling of energy’s byproducts and toxicities. All of these are aimed to be part of an integrated, continuous system. From the extraction of critical materials to the thermal comfort of housing interiors, from underground energy storage systems to the infrastructures of solar parks and their consequences of land and soil disturbances, from technological assemblages of dams and wind turbines to industrial models designed for the circulation of heat and energy, the studio aims to critically blur the line between high- and low-technologies, production and consumption, nature and culture.
Following their investigations, students design low-carbon models that stretch from architecture's materialities to their wider territories.
Studio Method
Engaging with the fields of environmental and energy humanities, the studio establishes a close dialogue between architecture, environment, and energy. The studio rests on an understanding of architectural projects and sites as always situated in larger systems of relations and dependencies. Systems that are layered and multifaceted, connecting form and politics, matter and meaning, human and beyond-human life, nature and culture. The studio’s work is research-driven, where students investigate energy questions in relation to a specific site, territory, type, or phenomena. Research and mapping tools are deployed to construct assemblies of information that can act as operative cartographies: Diagrams, maps, and inventories that both index existing situations and propose new architectural relations, uses, and operations on the landscape. Design is understood as integral to all parts of the studio, a key component that bridges theory, research, and practice. Design tasks are developed throughout the process and are implemented across multiple media and formats. Mixing artistic craft and technical knowledge, high-quality representations used range from maps to detailing, from photomontage to material modelling.
The studio is taught in collaboration with the Urban Ecologies course in the Sustainable Urban Planning and Design master’s program and revolves around transdisciplinary sharing of work and knowledge between the students of the SUPD and Architecture programs.
Competencies
- Strong ability to individually research, map, and define the themes, sites, and programs framing your project.
- Confidence in spatial research methodologies and in turning critical thought into articulate design proposals.
- Trans-scalar design capabilities integrating detail, architectural, and territorial scale aspects of projects into a coherent spatial strategy.
- Ability to present and communicate work using cartographic, diagramming, design drawing, image, and model-making techniques.
Teachers: Adria Carbonell, Sara Davin Omar, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis