academics vs. reality

When faced with the challenge of a design thesis, it becomes obvious how academics can clash with reality. It is a dualism I am often struggling with, but perhaps more because of how it interests me, and how I enjoy (and find crucial) the challenge of being relevant in terms of both than anything else.

The project is a Chinese one. Or, the site is. The ambition is to deal with issues of global relevance, where China is perhaps a testing ground, perhaps a place where things are put to the knifes edge, and perhaps a place in desperate need of help. I know China in a way that I suspect is the core of FOA's choice of name; to know and understand, but without being trapped in the critical stance of an insider. Perhaps, I hope, my thesis can give something to China, but certainly China will contribute to my thesis.

Anyway, back to the duality of academics and reality. The project has grown in my mind over the last two years, so by now I am set on investigating a whole series of issues in the course of this architectural design. (Primarily, I am passionately interested in the search for a new public domain [book tip: In Search for New Public Domain, Hajer & Reijndorp] and its spatial consequences, especially in relation to de Sola Morales' urban tribes, and the concept of parochialization of places and network urbanism.) But to bring these issues and interests (of which public domain is one) together in a design project poses a problem. A project need a coherence, a strong idea that positions it in the architectural discourse, that can communicate it's complexity to a critic or reader. And herein comes the conflict, reality is utterly complex and never as simple as a single concept; academic projects on the other hand, need limitations and definitions that limit the scope and brings it together, in order to communicate. So clearly I need to define a theoretical vessel that can incorporate all aspects of the thesis.

In my search for this, I was wandering into the AA DRL (Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory) website. Their theme this year is parametric urbanism, a subject which interests me immensely even though I am not in an environment to get into it too closely. It has many links to my thoughts about the project, so I spent some time reading the briefs and looking into what the studio produced.

(As a side note, and I am sure I'll get to the subject quite often in my posts, it is fascinating to compare my own, highly individual journey to an architecture degree to that of schools such as the AA. In many ways, they reach higher than me, but yet, I probably would not switch... But who knows, maybe I'll be there in a couple of years. That would require some financial blessings though.)

One of four briefs in the studio, that of Theodore Spyropoulos, is on Adaptive Ecologies. Some excerpts (of a total of two paragraphs):

Urban development through an adaptive model of ecology is the focus of the studio.
...
The pursuit of reflexive systems in urban design is developed through generative computational processes as time-based phasing logics. Homeostatic and ecological relational systems of fitness and balance are conditioned through the parametric. Ecosystems are not isolated from each other, but are interrelated. The first principle of ecology is that every living organism has an ongoing and continual relationship with every other element that makes up its environment. The ecosystem is composed of two entities, the entirety of life, the biocoenosis, and the medium in which life exists, the biotope.

Now from there they took off in a direction in which I don't which to follow, but the connection is already quite obvious: ecology is the vessel, the transcription, for my thoughts on public domain. Biocoenosis (is that a real word, or did he make it up? It is.) is the urbanites, the people, the urban tribes. And the biotope is the spatiality. So banal it is almost embarrassing to write, and yet I believe it has all it needs to solve my current dilemma.

And, to prove that it does make sense (a rough sketch):