ARCH-4980.6 | Chris Perry, Assistant Professor

ECOTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

Pursuit of a New Typology

JACQUELINE FULGINITI

This body of work looked to the historical connections found in the post-war era through military technology and architecture.   The exponential increase in technology coupled with new uses for aluminum and other metals helped airplanes to first gain a foothold in our history and in our society, and then to places beyond earth.

Processes that enabled the cockpit to evolve came from cybernetic thinking of closed loops.  The critical key to man being able to interact with the machine was establishing a link between them both.  This link in an airplane was established through the cockpit.  The manner in which the man must interact with the cockpit, and thus the airplane, led to the study and establishment of the man and machine interfaces.  Cybernetic thinking led from the interfaces between man and machines throughout society.

Future warfare needs to be headed toward combating the climate, since otherwise it will be between people of the earth fighting each other in vain attempts to find a temperate climate, sufficient food, and safe areas where they can fruitfully live. The purpose for the Gaian Logic Lab was to examine today’s society and forecast the reuse and repurposing of abandoned military bases.  Using current relevant topics as global climate change and pollution, the idea of creating an environmentally conscious and earthbound work was developed.

What better way, then, to establish a new typology than through renewing an old military base?  Once used for combat, the Logic was redesigned to conform to combating a non-military future and a fictional environmental catastrophe, a catastrophe where people work together to create a safe world.  Creating an architectural intervention that determined the identity of the future fictional lab pursued a new typology that did not exist. The form was not determined by the programming of spaces, but rather through the abstract idea of the mission of the lab to control climate change to save humanity.  The form became the identity of the lab and its mission. This notion challenged the idea of an accepted lab typology and proceeded to explore and propose a new one.