Bachelor of Architecture /
[Re_Map]
2008/09 sees the emergence of a new BArch Studio Unit, [Re_Map]. We are preoccupied with data, networks and visualization. We are interested in the contemporary city as a political and cultural hybrid in flux rather than as a place.
Re_Make
We are principally concerned with the ownership of space, its perception, demarcation and [mis]use in the contemporary city. We have entered a post-digital age in which how we design has become as significant as what we design. We embrace new mapping methodologies to make the complex accessible and the latent visible. Urban and cartographic space may be historically bound, but emergent networks are formed from information space, physical space or social space; often a hybrid of these types, whether organising patterns of data, navigating the city or representing hierarchical relationships within and between socio-political structures. The question of what constitutes territorial, community, networked and residual space is paramount to our research. This depends on a reading of near-futures underpinned by an understanding of global economics and the reality of a limitless information space and datascape. The devices of appropriation, enclosure, severance, fragmentation, and cultural identification of space are examined as, simultaneously, forces and reactions in physical space and within the datascape. It is with these enquiries that we construct an ideological position. We re_make the city.
Re_Model
We mobilise the unit as a platform for design and theory teaching, testing and research. We then operate with this data to develop strategies for change, urban renewal and landscape processing. We believe the studio to be a research laboratory for analysis, evaluation and prototyping. Strategic proposals are formulated across a range of scales from master-planning through to 1:1 detail production. We synthesise legible solutions as a response to the systems and processes we engage with and explore and define new methods of visualisation. We re_model the urban landscape.