This week the focus of my analysis was on finding the structural solution which best fulfils the concept of my project. There are 3 main reference points which I took into account in my endeavour to explore the need of contemporary individual to escape reality and looked at ways this has been dealt before in architecture?
Constant’s New Babylon Project
Concept: Anti-capitalist city populated by homo-ludens – a man at play. It depicts the post-revolutionary individual who wanders from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations. Beholden to no one, he would sleep, eat, recreate and procreate where and when he wanted. Type of architecture responsive to the need for playing, for mobility and which provides all the conditions needed for the individual to create his own life.
Structure: Interlinked, transformable structures; variety of scales; megastructure above ground; architecture which instigates a transformation of daily reality.
Reality as a Stage Set – Introduction to ‘Crash’ – “In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.”
Vermilion Sands – Ballard depicts imaginary vacation resort fully automated, ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. He introduces the reader to the concept of psychotropic houses (etymology: stimulated by the mind) which responds to your inner feelings and adjust accordingly.
Social Media – Es Devlin stage set designer
Argues that we exist in the era of post materialist consumption, which has now been evolved away from the need to own stuff. Our neophillia is addiction to those dopamine rushes that attend every novelty and could be satisfied in future just by seeing new things on our Instagram feeds and passing them on rather than having to go and buy them. This somehow links to the previous blog I did about the term luxury and its definition nowadays – here’s the link https://distorteduniverse.wordpress.com/portfolio/in-a-utopian-future-what-counts-as-luxury/
