THE GREEN DIP. New MSc2 Design Studio. Spring 2018
This studio is a collaboration between The Why Factory and UTS Sydney. Students from Australia will travel to Delft during the last weeks of the studio and will work collaberately with TUDeft students.
The Green Dip seeks to reconsider the spatial, biological, and metaphorical construct of “Nature” in our cities.
Can ecological principles be an active substrate for the construction of a fertile and dense urban fabric? Can the city be understood as a living machine? Can we design our new housing blocks, office towers, streets or city infrastructure based on novel ecosystems? Can Nature be understood as a provider of ecosystem services? What are the spatial and cultural landscapes resulting from introducing Nature in the compact city? If the infrastructures have traditionally been the generating lines of urban development, is it not time to make the ecological, agricultural or forestry production a new ferment?
The Green Dip seeks to experiment with the fabrication of the city of the future though state of the art green planning, food production, ecology, health and biodiversity. This in turn should construct a new relationship with the rural landscape. If the future of humanity relies on the collective benefits of urban density, it is essential to reduce both land consumption and the energy needed to construct and operate the horizontally dispersed city. Can thus greenery, landscape or production traditionally restricted to the ground level continue up and into the building? What facades, what roofs, what floors, what surfaces, what construction details allow green to take over our cities? Students will be asked to design buildings that include traditional urban uses, yet producing food and energy, cleaning their own water, recycling their own waste and holding a great degree of biodiversity.
A symbiotic world of people, plants and animals. Can this symbiosis between city and countryside in one spatial envelope offer essential argumentation to the global concerns regarding of urbanization and consumption?
Related courses
MSc2 Seminar Future Models I (AR0078)