UCLA

This studio is about going off the grid at an urban scale.

Distribution infrastructures - for power, water, heat, fuel, information, and waste - have dramatically expanded their impact on the built environment over the last century. As technical networks penetrate more pervasively the contemporary way of life, the form and construction of homes, schools, workplaces, and cities becomes beholden to the physical organizations of these nodal and networked systems. Building designs are dictated by the expense and form of mechanical, circulation and distribution systems. The human form of cities are themselves distorted through the infrastructure required for massive car use. Our modern cities and homes are thus shaped and ordered by the requirements of equipment as opposed to designs for people.

The cost of these networks in terms of form, energy, environmental impact, is increasingly apparent. The challenges to the premise of the grid are urgent. What if the grid itself were unnecessary? Are there solutions that liberate design from the physicality of infrastructure?  What if you could generate all the energy you needed in your own home? What new, local infrastructures could appear in place of the old?

POWERPACK takes as a hypothesis that local power generation is possible, literally that a small powerpack could substitute for all the current infrastructure of a building. Power becomes local and portable. It also considers local material cycles - recycling material directly into the powerpack, or harvesting waste material for unprecedented uses or even tectonic expression. What role could machines and robots play in this new ecology? What forms might emerge when the city itself goes off the grid?

In the last decade, our environments have become ever more mobile with increasing sensing and processing capability, and therefore with greater intelligence. The next generation of designers should be trained to engage and imagine the potential of dynamic, deformable environments with the situational awareness to adapt and transform smartly. In an effort to reduce the real estate as well as energy footprint of buildings, transformable structures are inevitable. The next frontier in architectural innovation is not shape and complexity but spectacular motion. This 2013 studio will investigate the implications of both moving and intelligent structures.

This studio will be led by UCLA Distinguished Professor and Pritzker Prize winning architect Thom Mayne and Eui-Sung Yi as a year-long research investigation at the graduate level in collaboration with the NOW Institute, UCLA’s dedicated urban planning and research center with a history of over 10 years of initiatives that span the greater Los Angeles region and abroad. A core advisory group includes Charles Waldheim, Harvard GSD Chair of Landscape Architecture; Alan Berger, MIT Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture; Albert Pope, Rice Professor of Architecture; David Herd, Principal, Buro Happold; and Greg Otto, Principal, Buro Happold. 

Birthed from the idea that education should not be pursued in a vacuum, the NOW Institute SUPRASTUDIO challenges the paradigm of pure academia with a hybrid approach into new territory that combines disciplined research and professional rigor. Past projects include the award-winning L.A. NOW series, new town planning for the City of Madrid, the Float House for residents of New Orleans, and consulting for shrinking post-industrial cities across America. The NOW Institute SUPRASTUDIO expands beyond architecture and urban research in the academic sphere to respond to complex, real issues and their spatial manifestations. The complexity of urban phenomena is studied through an interdisciplinary, integrative approach and hybridizes interactions across diverse disciplines. The social, cultural, historical, economic, and political layers that generate today’s modern condition are analyzed before a problem is stated. Prescriptive solutions are replaced with reasoning and relevant design. This model of research, problem formation, and design is the blueprint that will drive intelligent, informed solutions for any other independent scenario. 

In facing our complex modern urban condition, SUPRASTUDIO and the NOW Institute maintain a rigorous research and design methodology and anticipate an outcome of cultural intelligence, social relevance, and the broader advancement of our urban environment.