Cybernetic Insurgence II: Super Order

Diploma 16 is exploring emerging design and fabrication techniques capable of adapting to new environmental contingencies. The generation of cultural and BIOMEspecific urban public space, where morphology and a time-based metabolism (in)form an overall urban ecology, will be a continuing focus of research. This year’s brief proposes the production of new social, economic, environmental and cultural orders as primers for a resilient, self-generating urban morphology capable of being deployed in the tabula rasa conditions associated with the production of new cities. These prototypical urban forms and structures will be informed by an investigation of alternative architectural production methods and urban models based on cybernetics, adaptation to our rapidly changing environment, and the need for biodiversity and social sustainability.

Central to the unit is a belief in the projective power of architecture and urban design. Each student will develop a comprehensive urban thesis formulating a new ‘Super Order’ capable of adapting to future change. The treatise will include an extended case study analysing the bases for this order, from critique to ideology, and from manifesto to technology and technique. In addition a BIOME-specific urban manifesto and abstract will be developed in order to build an individual research consultancy relating the project to a larger cultural context. Exploiting the innate opportunities afforded by generative and associative modelling techniques, BIMS and digital manufacture, we will begin the year with a series of computational workshops that will allow each student to develop their own repertoire of BIMS and associative modelling techniques used for the generation of a BIOME-specific eco-systemic model. Finally, we will embrace the fundamental belief in the exploration and exploitation of architectural/urban form to formulate an architectural/urban critique and appropriation based on ideological rationale in parallel with critical learning and reflection.

Unit Staff

Andrew Yau & Jonas Lundberg are members of Urban Future Organisation, an international architecture practice and design research collaborative. UFO has won a number of international competitions, exhibited its work at the Venice and Beijing Biennales and was featured in 10X10 v2. Currently they are working on large-scale urban and architectural projects in the Far East.