Post-Internet Cities (The Temporal City)

Masters Architecture Studio Semester 2 2023 | Ian Nazareth & David Schwarzman

The studio speculates about a possible, domain of urban and architectural invention – i.e., a city’s imminent escape from cadastral space, embracing virtual realms and digital ubiquity, and the hyper-reality of the virtual space as mooring of invisible cultural, economic, and societal forces. It aims to make specific trajectories visible - where technological shifts might get inscribed in the urban process and therefore crystallised in architectural practice. The studio operates at limits of material and spatial practice, (between the physical, the virtual and holographic) engaging with real-time, urban data analytics, simulation / gamification, techno-cultural discourse / narrative, AI and generative techniques.

The Temporal City (∆T)6 is part of an anthology of The Temporal City, that is a hypothesis and model that presents the urban condition as kinetic processes that are simultaneously and synchronously enabled by the flow of data, energy, people and logistics. It proposes a spatial operating system, a stream of inputs and outputs and an organic mechanism that forestalls a chronologically-based urbanism. Traditional and static principles of the city are upturned. The Temporal City is not about absolutes or repeatable spatial products - but a context and framework that embraces and amplifies indeterminate, contradictory, combinatory, uncertain and improbable conditions. It is opportunistic. Agility instead of stability, multipliers rather than repetition. Change, difference, and time are accelerated. The complexity of its systems benefits from variability, unpredictability, and imbalance.

Wednesday evenings 17.00 - 21.00, 100.10.001 tuesdaymornings dirt, data & dwelling

In Regulatory Nonsense, the written rules governing property relations are co-written by an AI-amalgamation of poets, storytellers, artists, and philosophers. Using this glitchy, linguistically thick language, we blur, nudge, and renegotiate title boundaries and thresholds of bare-minimum compliance in novel and generative ways. Perhaps, through these new and nonsensical property relations we may also find new possibilities for architecture.

This semester, we return to issues of property relations and regulations with a renewed focus on how acts of planetary ownership are locally and materially constituted. We will explore the ways that AI and architecture are both intrinsically material practices, reliant on extractivism. And, we will use the former Cave Hill quarry site in Lilydale as a speculative sandbox to explore the ways that regulatory language delineates or dilutes ownership conditions for dwelling, data, and dirt.

Since Regulatory Nonsense began, NLP technologies have become more plausibly human but also more problematically opaque, in both content and intent. As criticality is obfuscated by hype, we must work harder — and work together — to unpick the logics and politics of AI/ML/DL technologies in design practice. Regulatory Nonsense therefore offers a collaborative curriculum: through structured esquisses, you will enact democratic processes, co-write ownership rules, and co-make worlds, while remaining individually accountable for you own (ethical and architectural) responses.

In Strata Party, you will perform two broad design investigations:

1) Together, we will negotiate and co-write a new regulation for ownership of dirt, data, and dwelling with help from a suite of glitchy linguistic bots trained on our own critically curated datasets.

2) Collaboratively, you will conduct a series of architectural design quasi-experiments to evidence the effectiveness, limitations, and possibilities of this new regulation –eventually culminating in your own resolved and cohesive architectural project at the former Cave Hill Quarry in Lilydale

Along the way, we must be nimble in our disciplinary positioning, toggling back-and-forth between the reciprocal roles of policymaker and architect; juggling the demands of rule-making (for all, for others) and (our own) design intent; grappling with the ghosts of inherited colonial bureaucracy.

Site Visit: Saturday 29 July

Student Led Pre-Mid-Sem Peer Review: Week 6

Mid-Sem Review: Friday, Week 7

International Guest Lecture: Week 8