MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: The Movie

The documentary of the MA A+U 2014 Symposium MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: Happiness in Emerging Environments is now available to watch at the symposium website

http://utopiamcr.wix.com/utopiamcr#!video/cusu

MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: Report

The Fifth Annual MA Architecture + Urbanism International Symposium was held at Manchester Art Gallery on 1 May 2014 with the theme MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: HAPPINESS IN EMERGING ENVIRONMENTS. In his opening remarks the symposium chair PAUL SHEPHEARD referred to the renaissance quest for utopia (prior to Thomas More's first use of the term) as being represented in Vasco da Gama's voyage to discover Eden. It was an attempt, albeit an inevitably frustrated one, to make the world a better place, although the methods to achieve that aim might fall into hard and soft options, where the former category overlaps unpleasantly with totalitarian agendas. Shepheard predicted that the day's presentations would fall into the 'soft utopia' category in the morning, leaving 'hard utopia' to form the basis of the afternoon.

The first speaker ANASTASIA KARANDINOU preceded her own research by showing the recently deceased Hans Hollein's 'mobile office' project from the mid 1960s where he looked forward to utopian environments which were essentially ephemeral in nature. Her research into the digital possibilities of installations and their relationship to sensory experience was seen as augmenting architecture's potential to define space beyond the visual and the material. She raised the question as to whether we can reconstruct the experience of a city from its fragments, a recovery perhaps dependent on a utopian reliance on technology.

Having thereby revealed herself as falling into the 'hard utopia' category, James Burton and Oliver Farrell of WHITE PAPER GAMES continued the theme of fragmented memory in describing the process of creating their games design company's first release Ether One. Adopting the scenario of a struggle against dementia, their provocative presentation emphasised the need to create an emotional engagement with an environment, actual or virtual, which was an implicit riposte to the rational utopianism of more familiar architectural products.

In the roundtable discussion that followed there was a clear generational divide between those made uncomfortable by these digital utopias, because of their potential for submission to political control, and those who saw them as offering new possibilities for experience and experimentation. John Grindrod suggested that the structure behind digital experience, games or installation environments, could be mor interesting than their immediately seductive appearances. What was emerging, however, was the connection between utopia and some form of therapeutic remedy to a malign condition, urban, societal or mental.

After informal lunchtime discussions PIPPO CIORRA explored 'architopia', an expression of 'utopia lust' which linked it as a critical device with the political context. Presented as social, monumental or technological alternatives he explored the history of Italian architecture through a utopian lens which saw architects designing for a society which was not there, but was in their heads. His challenge as a curator was to present it as a 'tabula no rasa', an anamnesis of projects the motto of which might be that 'badly applied utopia produces ruins'.

JOHN GRINDROD contrasted this frustrated utopia with the achievements of British new town of the post war period. Ambition matched with realism was responsible for producing a modicum of the happiness mentioned in the symposium subtitle. Although differences could be explored in detail in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Milton Keynes he asserted that the broad direction of these new settlements was a benign provision of improved living conditions for the working people of industrialised cities. Their resulting form could be seen to reflect the political phases of, respectively, the postwar consensus, the 'white heat of the technological revolution, and incipient Thatcherism (an individualistic utopia).

Declaring herself to be pragmatic rather than utopian ODILE DECQ discussed by way of introduction her practice's work in the context of some installation projects. She then moved on to lead the audience through a mixture of cultural and commercial projects in Paris, Rennes, Lyon, Rome, Tangiers, and Nanjing and her next (educational) utopia the new architecture school Confluence. All were characterised by Decq's strong spatial, material and chromatic sense which creates a very personal vision of architectural possibilities. Perhaps the most beguiling of these was the private commission of a black yacht which recalled the image of the voyage of discovery with which Paul Shepheard had begun the day's discussions.

In the final roundtable, although there was some disagreement about the interpretation of the utopian project, it was agreed that the fascination with the idea of utopia, of an ideal city, was still very powerful. Pippo Ciorra predicted that the 'architect as demiurge' would be evident, under the direction of Rem Koolhaas, in this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, where new urban visions would be displayed to beguile the architectural community, drawing the day's discussions to an optimistic and convivial conclusion that the quest for utopia remains one of architecture's fundamentals.

Symposium report 2013 Symposium report 2012 Symposium report 2011 Symposium report 2010

MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: HAPPINESS IN EMERGING ENVIRONMENTS

Fifth Annual MA A+U International Symposium

Venue: MANCHESTER ART GALLERY Date: 1 MAY 2014 Time: 10.00 am - 4.30 pm

PAUL SHEPHEARD

ANASTASIA KARANDINOU

WHITE PAPER GAMES

PIPPO CIORRA

JOHN GRINDROD

ODILE DECQ


TICKETS

Anastasia Karandinou / Manchester / May 1

MA A+U are very pleased to announce that Dr. Anastasia Karandinou (University of Portsmouth) will be speaking at the Fifth Annual MA A+U Symposium MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: HAPPINESS IN EMERGING ENVIRONMENTS in Manchester on May 1. Dr. Karandinou is the author of No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture published by Ashgate Studies in Architecture

How do digital media (mobile phones, GPS, iPods, portable computers, internet, virtual realities, etc.) affect the way we perceive, inhabit and design space? Why do architects traditionally design, draw and map the visual, as opposed to other types of sensations of space (the sound, the smell, the texture, etc.)? Architecture is not only about the solid, material elements of space; it is also about the invisible, immaterial, intangible elements of space. This book examines the design, representation and reception of the ephemeral in architecture. It discusses how architects map and examine the spatial qualities that these elements create and questions whether - and if so, how - they take them into account in the designing process.Karandinou argues that current interest in the ephemeral in contemporary culture and architecture is related to the evolution of digital media; and that it is related to the new ways of thinking about space and everyday situations that new media enables. With sound and video recording devices now being embedded in everyday gadgets and mobile phones, capturing sounds or ephemeral situations and events has become an everyday habit. New animation techniques allow designers to think about space through time, as they are able to design dynamic and responsive spaces, as well as static spaces explored by someone over time. Contemporary video games are no longer based on a simple visual input and a keyboard; they now involve other senses, movement, and the response of the whole body in space. This book therefore argues that the traditional binary opposition between the sensuous and the digital is currently being reversed. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool-to-think-with about space. Designers are now able to think through time, and design spaces accordingly. Time, temporality, ephemerality, become central issues in the designing process. The notion first claimed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, that the emergence of new digital media caused a 'shift in the sensorium', is more relevant than ever, and can be expanded in order to accommodate the new emerging technologies. Through analysis of theoretical concepts, design case studies, and real-life observations, this book challenges and inspires architects, theorists, researchers and students both about the above-mentioned series of questions, and also about possible methodologies for addressing them. Tickets for the Symposium, including lunch, are available here