Design Studio fall semester 2017/2018

PATTERNS OF GROWTH: UNNATURAL ECOLOGIES

This volume presents an overview of the work conducted in the Design Studio PATTERNS OF GROWTH:
UNNATURAL ECOLOGIES during the fall semester of the academic year 2017/2018 with the students from the
ninth semester at the Faculty of Architecture, University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” Skopje.
L. Hilberseimer, The New City, 1944, “Bird’s-eye view of commercial area and settlement unit”
“There are no cities, in fact, anymore. It goes on like a forest . . . . We should think about the ways we have to
live in a jungle, and maybe we do well with that” - Mies van der Rohe, 1955
 CONTENT

Introduction
Patterns of Growth: Studio theme xi
Unnatural Ecologies: Urbanity between object and field xiii

Part One: Research

From object to field to metabolism
Task 1: Ecology 19
Task 2: Object to field 21
Task 3: Object as formation 23

Essay 1: The ambiguous surface 24
Essay 2: Towards a neometabolism 28

Task 4: Map of dynamic relations 33

A water ritual 34
A city of endless waste and recycle 35
Perpetuum mobile islands 36
Galloping stripes 37
Twin cities and herbalism 38
A wireframe landscape 39

Site visit: A gallery of landscape elements 40

Task 5: Materplan or the city as a hyper asset 55
Mid-term presentation and guest lectures 61

Part Two: Projects

A new metabolic cycle in the territory of Skopje
The stripe of density 67
Remedial patches 77
Agricultural archipelago 87
Botanical research institute 97
Island 109
The lake resort 119

Part Three: Exhibitions 127

AHO - The Oslo school of architecture and design
AFS - The faculty of architecture in Skopje, IAS 14

Credits 141

 PATTERNS OF GROWTH
Studio theme

The Patterns of Growth studio investigates transformative specifics of urbanity i

conditions of continuous quantitative change, taking the city of Skopje as its home-
base captivating laboratory. The studio follows the concept of growth as an inherent
and vital feature of every city, and explores its various possibilities in terms of size,
volume and density. Over each studio session, growth is being tested through the po-
tential of the collective realm of urbanity as a dialectical amalgam capable to bridge
public and private interests within metropolitan territory by means of identifying and
inventing social relationships, spatial possibilities, and testing the capacities of voids
and distributive networks of the city. Thus, the city becomes a political act of the
urban collective.

The work embraces various programmatic constraints: from housing and the myth of
domestic space to public space and architecture of collective hedonism. The projects
conducted within the studio operate between different scales, a ways aiming to en-
courage creative / critical / polemical thinking and contextual provocations.

The 2017 session entitled “Patterns of Growth: Unnatural Ecologies” explores the
relationship between architecture and nature on the case of Skopje, a city that occu-
pies more than one third of the country’s overall population and just 2% of its overall
territory. This condition provokes continuous sprawl, exhausting the natural resourc-
es and the quality of the living conditions. The aim of the studio was to juxtapose the
value of architectural object as a man-made construct that is embedded at the very
foundations of urbanity providing comfort and security, and the system of landscape
as inseparable entity of civilization essentially enabling life resources. As a result, the
projects recall upon the notion of the ‘second nature’ not as a harmonized mixture of
architecture and environment, but as a fusion of both in a search for an extra-histori-
cal-post-urban model of metropolitan life.

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 UNNATURAL ECOLOGIES
Urbanity between object and field

The studio projects elaborate the importance of architectural form as an object of

absolute reference for the city-building, an artificial manifes o that merges with the
existing landscape in a process of becoming an experience of Unnatural Ecology. By
strategic interpolations of autonomous objects that are ready to articulate the contex-
tual resources of the existing landscape, a new urban infrastructure emerged, one that
solidifies the ratio and madness of the current contemporary co dition. The newly
established entities are perceived as infrastructure machines permanently embracing
the transitory behavior of contemporary social, political as well as environmental
currents of the city of Skopje. Thus, nature, infrastructure and architecture provide
the basic research resources that established a relationship between the natural and
the unnatural. The projects are examined on the edge locations of the city with the
aim of creating test-bed islands, research laboratories, enclaves perceived as distinct
entities in the repulsive totality of the natural landscape and the urban collective.
The interpolation of this unnatural ecology in the actual context provides
the essence for investigating the collective domain within the reality of the neoliberal
city. Thus, the terrain vague of the existing vast lands (a broader location of 6x6km)
opens the backdrop for experiencing the contemporary models of heterotopias within
the limits of delineated territorial fragments.
In such a condition, the concept of biosphere is perceived as an entity of
calculated data and analyzed information that integrates the dynamic relations in
nature. The value of biosphere as natural construct is deliberately enriched with
Structuralist and Metabolist concepts for spatiality and growth and the aspects of
social engineering and cultural freedom that span from constructivist project from
the 1920’s Soviet architecture envisioning the better world, to the hedonism of living
in a world of commodities revealed by the Italian radical movement of the Florence
groups where the cityscape is being reduced on architecture of anonymous contain-
ers and urban life drowned in the multitude of media and market hyper-reality. In
such theoretical patchwork, the studio simultaneously explores temporality and the
concept of voluntary exodus of the individual, both as an act of freedom, always
enriched with specific programs, inner and outer spatialit , and precise relationship
towards the condition of the natural environment. The overall studio project embrac-
es the generic notion of temporality and change as a ground for radical re-thinking of
the concept of urbanity itself.

< Andrea Branzi, For a None Figurative Architecture, Typewritten diagrams, 1968

XIII
The concept of big structures is transgressed towards the big picture as a method to
conceive our own urban environments as ultimate Utopian idea. Conditions that pro-
vide preferences but also open potentials simultaneously for (temporary) inhabitants
and local economies.
The studio designedly encourages collaborative work and sharing both knowledge
and production efforts as its basic design methodolog . It continuously strives to
embrace individual, social and political desires, dreams and beliefs that constitute the
experience of collective memory, as the city itself represents. Therefore, the end re-
sult of the studio work tends to be a product that stems from the collective conscious-
ness of each of the contributors.
The work methodology relies upon three basic pedagogical tools for ex-
ploration and interpretation: the first is the Scale of the tas , which is simultaneously
urban and architectural, combining architectural gestures and spatial cut-outs with
various possibilities of contemporary urban experience; especially as this year the
scale was framed within the vastness of the natural landscape. Second, the theoretical
References that extend the limits of possibilities and perceptions, exploring tempo-
rality as contemporary condition embedded in metropolitan program and spatiality.
And, as the third come the architectural drawings and representations used primarily
as a communicational tool that aims to establish relationship between subjective idea
and sensibility in regard of working in a group and the generic context of contempo-
rary society; in particular, the studio encourages various collage protocols and analog
model making in the process of design.
Within the methodological and pedagogical framework of the studio, an
intense series of weekly studio tasks were conducted at the beginning of the semes-
ter, in order to establish distinction between the meanings of terms of strategy, data
processing and theoretical concepts, and the possibility to be used as territorial assets.
Relative to the site, this year both the research and the architectural design evolved
around five ecological themes of soil (pollution), water (flood , air (heat and wind),
as well as waste disposal and re-use-able resources, each of them in terms of specifi
micro-environmental conditions that clearly establish relationship between archi-
tecture, city and landscape in the process of creating the totality of the Unnatural
Ecology.

< Archizoom Associati, No-stop City, 1969 - 1972

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