Building design with Landscape Studio 412
UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Winter 2023This studio will focus on the order and organization of a building for plants—their development, preservation, and study. In taking on the particularities of such a program we are also turning our attention to the order of things more generally. As we move away from the conventions that govern human-centered architecture, making a building for both plants and humans (as well as their associated ecologies) will necessarily challenge many of our underlying organizational assumptions.
More often than not, the origin of architecture is located as an act of shelter, demarcating and establishing the boundary between the human and natural world, producing a categorical distinction where perhaps there isn’t one. Not only is this narrative one-sided, it is also inaccurate. Architecture has always had to address the needs, functions, and necessities of non-human subjects. Grain silos, animal habitations, storage units, power plants, server stations, and distribution centers, are all central to our built environment even as their forms and organizations relate to functions, measures, and behaviors different from our own. Living in the anthropocene, we can no longer invest ourselves in these dichotomous imaginaries, as we know the deep, intractable, and catastrophic relationship this stages.
Extinct in the Wild refers to the The International Union for Conservation of Nature ranking just shy of extinction, in which a species can no longer exist outside of human care and intervention. In this studio will use the term as a conceit to question the imagined binaries between architecture and the natural world, to situate our work in the realities of our current moment, and in so doing to return to perennial epistemic questions that underscore architectural work.
Students work by UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Winter 2023