Year 5 and 6 Vertical Studio Rachel Armstrong and Juliet Odgers Oikos Transformed Our studio responds to the Open Letter to the architectural community: a call for curriculum change, which acknowledges architecture’s role in the ongoing ecological crisis. “We are concerned that at present our education does not give sufficient weight to the inherently ecological and political basis of architecture, nor to our responsibility to meet our uncertain future with socially and environmentally informed practice.” 1 Such a crisis requires our full attention and care. Radical new perspectives and ways of thinking are needed to reconstitute our modes of inhabitation, so that we may re-make the world anew. While global warming has brought ecological concerns to the fore, responses already have significant antecedents in architectural history that inform the relationship between design, science, art, environment, human needs and responsibilities (Anker, 2010a). The etymological origin of ecology 2 in the human house is our starting point for the studio. We argue that oikos is not merely a vague metaphor for ecology, but that built and “lived in” households offer a density of “life” and so provide a key to understanding the household of nature and so offer us clues for ecological living. Taking oikos as the fundamental unit of inhabitation, we ask what changes can we make in our daily lives – their organisation, design and construction – so that the architecture of a city becomes an extension of the world’s life force and part of our ongoingness, rather than further cause for concern. The enquiry is not limited to houses or ‘housing’, for though the oikos as home is our starting point, we allow the term to include quasi-familial groupings … a collective of fisherman? a sorority of midwives? A band of musicians? Oikos is taken as the paradigmatic social unit of mutual dependency and care, a microcosm contained within a permeable boundary that separates and connects the “ “family-like” unit to the wider polis and to the “economy” of nature itself. Home is taken as a complex economy with environmental responsibilities that certainly includes work and may include the spaces needed to pursue a ‘job’. Starting with the idea of oikos, we will develop principles of practice from the bottom-up as a way of reimagining the relationship between this family-like unit and the polis (city). We will prototype these ideas to functionality as a vision for a 21st century home that meaningfully informs the city to establish new ecological principles of theory and practice for architecture.
Canaletto, Entrance to the Cannaregio (showing Jewish Ghetto), National Gallery London 1
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/271857/open-letter-to-the-architectural-community-a-call-for-curriculum-change/ ecology (n.) 1873, oecology, "branch of science dealing with the relationship of living things to their environments," coined in German by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel as Ökologie, from Greek oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation" and -logia "study of". 2
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