Re: Public | Third Natures

Cristina Díaz Moreno, Efrén García Grinda and Tyen Masten

Everything is pop (and therefore nothing can really be pop anymore). Today any kind of cultural source is inserted in an ever-changing network of meanings and symbols. As a result, any distinction between high culture and pop has been replaced by a vast network of interwoven links, from multiple origins, which modulates the way in which each product is conceived, assembled and received. This is the space of interaction in which Diploma 5 will work again this year, rethinking and producing buildings as third natures.

The term third nature was originally coined in the sixteenth century to refer to a new reality halfway between existing categories. It was used specifically in relation to gardens that established culturally constructed relationships with nature, technology and history, and defined spaces with a radically new materiality. For Diploma 5, the concept of third nature is synonymous with space understood as the phenomenon of mediation between different materials of different origins. And so the entity formerly known as buildings can now be understood as an assembly, or as a complex ecology that acts as a linking mechanism between living beings, social groups and technological objects that work with cultural capital, politics and identity.

Diploma 5, however, is not a dogmatic unit, but works collectively as a group to develop the individual interests and agendas of students, tutors, guests and critics. Each student will consciously select and assemble a range of materials and technologies – beginning with a post-subculture as both context and scenario – in a specific and complex assembly. The form and the methodology with which this assembly is analysed, remixed, described and represented – in texts, books, hizines, drawings and images, videos and models – will be constantly subjected to a collective negotiation between the interests of the student and the unit. For Diploma 5 this process of gathering and assembling post-subcultural materials into third natures is to dream of the collective, to image the public realm in a subversive manner in the pursuit of extreme and radical forms of beauty.

Unit Staff

Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda are both architects and founders of the Madrid based office AMID.cero9 and regular collaborators to El Croquis. Since 1998 they have taught at ETSAM and ESAYA, and have been visiting teachers at Cornell, ESARQ and EPSA among others. They have won more than 30 prizes in national and international competitions, and their projects and writings have been collected in Breathable and From cero9 to AMID.

Tyen Masten works at Zaha Hadid Architects. Prior to joining the office in 2004, he was a graduate fellow at UCLA and worked extensively in both Los Angeles and New York.

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