Los Angeles: The Ground Beneath our Feet

This semester, architecture is charged with the city as a Worldbuilding exercise. Worldbuilding is not a recent term, but has found its way into our work with the use of active imaginaries, Foucauldian heterotopias, Afrofuturism and other strategies whereby the vessel of architecture is an agent within a much larger narrative of ground, human and nonhuman cultures, weathers, and ecosystems. It is more necessary than ever to consider how we are to survive our current late capitalist state, that Worldbuilding may enter as a measure. 

For the Material Ecologies strategies particular to our studio, we are working from a platform that is interactive. This interactivity is a critical feature in how we relate, collide, and otherwise dwell with others. Architects find new means of communicating with a Synthetic Nature in order to promote new relationships. This Synthetic Nature is a world of flora, fauna, and ecologies that is sensate, wired and alert, but with its own desires and propensities. As the artist-architect-AI scientist Gordon Pask would say, it is a conversation formed among equal participants, and not an electrochemical servant in deference to the human. Our studio utilizes material intelligence primarily in the form of an interactive system that makes explicit to our limited human senses how touch travels through cement, light bends in glass, and grain records wood. This cooperative exercise creates compound beings - objects resulting from the collision of Human and Synthetic tendencies, natures, properties, and relationships.

The site of the studio is in Los Angeles - specifically the La Brea Tar Pits or the Ballona Wetlands. Both are unstable sites of unknown ground compositions. A perfect place for our Synthetic Nature.