Unit 2 is shaped as a compact hybrid project between MA Architecture and MA Regenerative Design, in which students collaborate between courses, connecting places, perspectives and disciplines. This collaborative unit takes our students on a journey of designing relations and realities of land(scapes).
The title for this brief, ‘The Land: New Relational Paradigms’ builds on the plurality of land and its extended community, from the biotic (living) to abiotic (non-living) entities. Focusing on human and more-than-human relations, we will extend our understanding of relational landscapes and shape new manifestos for what ‘living together’ means. We are land, we belong to the land, and ‘The Land’ is an entity of many things: living, breathing, plural, multidimensional, cooperative, layered, trespassed, virtual, vacant, displaced and displacing. The title for this brief builds on the plurality of land and its extended community, from the biotic (living) to abiotic (non-living) entities. Focusing on human and more-than- human relations, we will extend our understanding of relational landscapes and shape new manifestos for what ‘living together’ means and how this situated our practice in design.
To enable an ecological and relational shift we need to challenge human-made binary understandings of land. How can we as architects and regenerative designers propose narratives of cohesiveness and oneness, which can give new weight to the entity we know as land? And what can mean for us collectively?
Students are selecting a lens as focus to unpack new relational paradigms: social, material, political, ancestral, geological, ethical or ecological and work in groups forming an attitude and practice. During the process groups are taken through immersive workshops, land talks with guest speakers, skill workshops on filmmaking and at the end deliver in form of a Film Festival.