The modernist movement looked to industrial processes – factories, warehouses and silos - to enhance their designs. Their dream was to create rationalized machines for living. They thought the functional glass box could modernize everyday life. By bringing efficiency into every aspect of the city, home, and schools we would become liberated creatives and thinkers. Since then, there have been many iterations of machine-methods applied to the physical and cultural environment.
For modernists rationalization was seen as an emancipatory critique of a heavily-weighted architectural tradition, which continuously generated superfluous decorative elements. That approach might have lost some relevance a century later, but the impetus behind it is still strong: to create architecture without architects. To envision a process of design that addresses communal needs.
In a contemporary society that is over-designed, over-securitized, over-rationalized and privatized, our battlefield is public space. Many architects and designers hack and tweak the city by transforming it in unexpected ways. The in-between spaces, which are still undefined, play an important role in the creative development and character of cities. Fenced, locked, skate-proofed, sit-proofed, sleep-proofed, the city has become sanitized.
Co-machines are the future. Co-machines are mobile informal micro-structures which are parasitic or symbiotic in this urban eco-system. Co-machines disrupt the overbearing market values to create alternative realities. Co-machines look for and exploit tipping points in the system. Co-machines obstruct, block traffic, change places, allowing new bodies to occupy and interact, inhabit, to construct- even if just for an instance a different world, a utopia, a dystopia- a vision of how the city might be, finding potentials in our urban landscape. Or they call to our attention the invisible ways our cities are being manipulated by zoning-laws, traffic laws, advertising, architects, graffiti-writers, skateboarders, conflicts, canals, planners.
If you have designed a Co-machine please submit your design for the Co-machine Open-Source Catalogue, which will capture and explain how to make DIY, adhoc, hackable, movable, microtectures. Please provide:
- At least 1 explanatory drawing of the machine
- At least 1 image or render of the co-machine
- Where and how it was deployed
- Your machine’s mission in it’s local environment
- Your CV
DEADLINE: March 31st 23:59 ECST
Up to 25 designs will contacted and invited to be featured in an exhibition where on/off will build the GUERRILLA PRINTING PRESS pictured. This MOBILE PRESS will allow for visitors to print and bind a copy of the Co-machine Open-Source Catalogue.
Title
Open Call: Co-Machines - Mobile Disruptive ArchitecturesType
Competition Announcement (Ideas)Website
Organizers
Registration Deadline
March 31, 2016 11:59 PMSubmission Deadline
March 31, 2016 11:59 PMPrice
Free