Pragmatic Utopia Studio Leaders: Gretchen Wilkins School or Institution: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Design Country: Australia Website: www.rmit.edu.au 1. Studio Leader Biography Gretchen Wilkins is a Senior Lecturer and Architecture Course Leader at RMIT School of Architecture and Design, teaching in the Urban Architecture Laboratory and a co-coordinator of the World Architecture Workshop. She has taught previously at an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan and a research fellow at the Japan Foundation. She is the editor of Entropia: Incremental Gestures Towards a Possible Urbanism (Champ Libre, 2008) and On-The-Spot: Atelier Hitoshi Abe (University of Michigan, 2007). 2. School The strategic direction of the School of Architecture and Design is underpinned by three guiding scholarship principles: scholarship-ofchange; curated and vertically integrated design scholarship; and tri-polar scholarship. We aim to address compelling,
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contemporary issues such as climate change, globalization and rapid urbanization in ways that facilitate cultural change through design. Our scholars, (students, lecturers and researchers), are risk-takers in the sense that they endeavour to bring about change both in design practice and by practicing design. These changes are pursued through refinement, criticism and experimentation and within an ethical framework of social justice and human rights. 3. Project Intention Given Slovenia’s mountainous landscape, ‘Pragmatic Utopia’ is procured from the curiosity to explore the possibilities of alpine dwelling and systems to best accommodate a possible upsurge of population increase in Maribor in 100 years. The outcome is a productive urban system that is self-generating and builds its architectural configuration based on the local context. It is a new building typology that carves into the landscape. Modern developments are based on levelling the ground than slip up. In this site of 20 hectares, 250 dph can be achieved based on carving programs into the thickened landscape, but with a wonderful perception that nature is still retained. Utilising various farming and energy harvesting technologies, the productive
metropolis is 80% selfsustainable. Infrastructures are embedded within the thickened landscape, leaving the surface seemingly untouched. By inserting urban scale infrastructures directly below the city, it increases the efficiency for a sustained density living, and also for the promotion of shared resources in community living. The project activates the curiosity to explore a multitude of hybrid programs and spatial articulation which sympathises with the lives of the occupants to make a place diversely functional. It is a speculative typology that connects social spaces and reestablishes the local clusters of alpine communities, in a much denser urban setting. Team Member Selene Wong Pragmatic utopia The design is a productive urban system that is customised to the Maribor’s alpine landscape. The project proposes a new dwelling typology with a direct response to the landscape, and to address a healthy communal living with a possible population increase in 100 years. It is a dialogue between the ‘landscape’ and ‘density’; coupled with an extended self-sustained infrastructural agenda that takes forces in the architectural elements and within the design. Projected Start: 2012 Projected End: 2112 Category: Technology