DESIGNING SPACE FOR EMERGENCE IS AN EMERGENCY

I am an architect and in January I started limiting my work activity to 3 hours per day because I wanted to spend my time thinking about space instead of designing it. I have been thinking about space for 8 month now and I’ve understood why I love space more than building.

The slides below summarize my thoughts about this. I created this presentation as a part of the conference “Smart People in Smart Cities” of the Digital Experience Festival in which I took part with Antonio Spinelli and Giuseppe Roccasalva, in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino, Hugh Dutton Associates architecture office and complexitys blog.

In the slides I explain why so many architects today are not interested in building. I also try to imagine how the future of space will be and how we, as architects, will design it. I especially focus on the importance of designing blank, unachieved, free, open  spaces to encourage emergent phenomena.

This presentation is the result of a lot of space experiences and project I participated in, just visited or knew about. Here is a list of references and exemples: Macao in Milan, dreamhamar in Norway, Ecosistema Urbano, basurama and la nave coworking in Madrid, the laguna project, Information lecture by CO-DE-IT, #spanishrevolution, european prize for urban public space, Smart Cities Workshop, Mutinerie and other French coworkings, my ideas for creative cohousing in Paris, Campo de la Cebada, Ostello Bello, the art project QUARTO, “Chambre vide” de Marion Baruch, “I wish this was…” by Candy Chang.

If you are interested, here are more interesting videos provided by curator Andrea Graziano:
+ What is Next Nature
+ Tracy Metz – Nature is an Agreement
+ Playing God – BBC Documentary 2012
+ David Chalmers – The Extended Mind
+ Andrew Hessel – Even evolution evolves
+ Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now

Some of the pictures I used have been shared on flickr.com under a creative commons license.
Many thanks to the authors, you are mentioned in the slides.