2-HONORABLE MENTIONS Archives - Non Architecture Competitions

TEAM: Cristina Cărcănescu (Romanian) – John Chia (Malaysian) – Sheffield School of Architecture

Random Access Memory has a mnemonic agenda, aiming to marry traditional crafting with digital manufacturing. The idea of crafting techniques becoming extinct leads to over-romanticised solutions of prevention, sometimes absurd and extreme, until the point of negating the benefits of the digital revolution. Through providing a growing, grid-like, temporary structure, RAM will develop ad-hoc, depending on the local needs and resources. Meant to act as a plug-in incubator, inserted locally, it will sit within a world-wide network of contemporary factories. The symbiosis between the digital and traditional is manifested in the way the studio’s modular structures develop. While the crafting workshops can expand in all three directions (x, y, z), the digital pods are always attached to them, +2.5m from the ground datum, creating a belt. The data gathered through analysing and emulating the different techniques is later stored to the cloud (connecting it yet again to the network) and embodied as a digital archive (the servers). The latter bounds the making spaces, representing the outer layer of the RAM. At the core of the system, the exhibition space acts as a bond, both displaying the collaboration between the two fabrication techniques as well as their individual merits.

September 14, 2016October 14, 2019

COWHOUSE

PRESENTATON IMAGE

TEAM: Angela Carbone – Tamara Jamil – United States of America – Cornell University

We must choose: Beef or revolution.

Where is the great American steer which once roamed among the human animal in Lower Manhattan? It has been banished from the mind’s eye of the urban American, relegated to architectural black-boxes: slaughterhouses. We automated our beef production in No-mans-lands, removing all connection, visibility, and responsibility to these creatures. Without bovine presence, the masses have blinded themselves to the creation and overindulgence of beef. Through typological reinvention, beef production is revolutionized for sustainable and conscientious consumption.

Cowhouse was borne from the idea that architecture can act as a site for physical production and as a vehicle to manufacture change. Following lines of production and reinserted into city landscape, patrons are invited to examine the life of cattle as they are raised, harvested, prepared, and ultimately consumed for human pleasure and sustenance. Its form, referential to slaughter and steakhouses, employs form as machinery to process. In turn, humans can engage in conversation about redesigning food networks and facilities with respect due to the animals, lands, and labourers involved. At the summit, patrons savour beefy thanksgivings. Through its form and its choreography of program, Cowhouse becomes a factory which produces awareness, compassion, education, nourishment, and delight.

September 14, 2016October 14, 2019

AN ANARCHIST FACTORY

TEAM: Rik Lambers – Dutch

AN ALTERNATIVE FOR JAKARTA’S ILLEGAL SQUATTERS

An Anarchistic Factory is an alternative for plain social housing which formalizes the low-skilled, in-formal, in-efficient jobs that squatters are doing now; recycling waste. It proposes to bypass Jakarta’s Ciliwung river at certain points and build a simple structure that takes in the heavily polluted riverwater.

In this structure, a factory floor will be build. The factory floor serves a modular system that drastically improves working conditions, speed and efficiency of all the recycling steps in the entire process.

A low-tech factory based on an assembly line is created.

The typology of the factory allows for larger economic profits. By understanding that squatters squat where they squat due to economic possibilities, we can use the typology of the factory to create a place which is economically more viable and thus we can control where squatters will squat.

The low-tech factory floor is based on a 875×875 grid. The factory is based upon this modular system of floor elements, each having a different infill according to the specific task of the recycling-process. The infills can be removed easily and placed elsewhere in the factory, making the factory floor very flexible for future situations.

Two thick concrete walls, filled with vegetation, creates a landscape-zone that separates working from living. Sometimes the landscape element, separating living and working, breaks out of the walls and creates a block which houses basic sanitation and a kitchen.

The columns and beams can be used as a construction for the houses and can easily be filled in with scaffolding or waste that is found during working hours.

The community goes back to the Indonesian ‘kampung’ idea that every function has its own place, instead of being scattered over the community. This idea allows to make improvements on basic sanitation and access to gas and electricity cost-efficient. A kitchen per community, not per household.

September 14, 2016October 14, 2019

WALK FOR PROGESS

TEAM: Wong Suen Yi – Chou Chia Yi – Taiwan

Mobile Factory for Protesting

Making is not only for producing products now,
It’s also for gathering people.
How to reconnect human with factory in this automated world?
We propose a mobile device, “Waking-Print”, as our flyer factory.
The low-tech working device is designed to be too heavy to be pushed by one person, therefore it needs a lot of people at the same time to operate it.
Recall the essential elements in the factory at first—the human.
The devices hide in the city everyday except demonstration happens. When demonstration starts, the scattered devices will be pushed to protesting place. People can see the tall device from a distance, and get a flyer printed by the “Walking-Print” while protester pushing it when marching.

Let’s Walk for Progress!

September 14, 2016October 14, 2019

PONOS

TECHINCAL IMAGE

TEAM: Frixos Petrou (Cyprus) – Studio Miessen – Sofia Nikolaidou (Greece) – University of Pennsylvania School of Design – Emeline Dussaucy (France) – VenhoevenCS – Matteo Novarino (Italy)

No one cares about ants:

Ponos noun [pon’-os]

God of hard labor and toil in Greek mythology.

PonosTM promotes itself as #thefutureofwork – an obscure facility for providing any and all kinds of services, from logistics to automobile prototyping. Truth be told, no-one really knows how it works. A black monolith is the only point of reference, the space where everything is meant to happen. The building has been the object of much speculation and a wide range of theories: some say it must be full of advanced technological machinery, supercomputers and 3d printers, that all tasks are fully automated; others, less optimistic, believe it to be packed with workers under slavery conditions – a human ant farm.

PonosTM echoes the conditions of modern labor; while we are constantly reminded of technological progression, human work remains widely necessary. Actually, the advanced state of technology has had a dire impact on the visibility of labor: outsourcing to poor countries, crowdsourcing to bored college students, impersonal freelancing – they all play a part in concealing the monumental amount of work required to keep our society going. At least PonosTM is honest: in its incredulous vagueness, it gives a physical form to precarious labor in 21^st century capitalism.

September 14, 2016October 14, 2019

FACTORY OF THE ABSURD

TEAM: Rafaela Sampaio Agapito Fernandes – Thaylini Cristine Luz Belino Bonfin – Miguel João Dias da Costa Pereira – Brazil – cora atelier

Making Time.

In our capitalist system a factory means more than manufacture goods, it means to manufacture goods efficiently. In terms of production, goods are produced at their lowest possible cost and labor are performed with the greatest possible productivity. Efficiency needs to be measured, it needs an instrument who dictates frequency, productivity and discipline, the clock, becomes then, an instrument of coercion. Time is money. The facture of the absurd is a machine that measure the passing of a time. The power source is produced by a human operator, and so, he is the one in the wheel dictating the productivity. If the man is tired, time slows down, if the man is in a hurry, so is the time. Therefore, this is an ironic factory, because it’s not interest in the logical (meaning simple and effective) but only the absurd, since it measures time in an obviously ineffective way: If this machine was operated in 60 rpm it would generate 1 minute in the real world, but humans wouldn’t be able to keep the same rpm for a long period of time causing an arrhythmia, consequently, this is more than a machine or a factory because it questions the way we’ve been ruled by time, and more specifically: the clock.

September 14, 2016October 14, 2019

URBAN FACTORY

TEAM: Sasa Ciabatti (Italian) – Bilyana Asenova (Bulgarian)

By tradition, manufacturing has been thought to be a process that turns raw materials into physical products, and the factory, in managing fragmented communications protocols and automation practices, is the structure where manufacturing happens. Today, drivers such as technology, sustainability, optimization and the need to meet customer demands have once again encouraged the transformation of the manufacturing industry, to become adaptive, fully connected and even cognizant of its own power quality.

How would the future answer to the production segregation of the past?

The future factory transforms from a receiver of instructions to an open environment for cooperation between suppliers and customers. With a flexible production and quick adaptation, suppliers and customers find themselves in a close collaboration at an early stage in the development of a new product.

Urban Factory highlights the importance of objects’ customization. The proposal establishes a new relationship between factory employers and clients. A new chain is created:

Customers meet an employee in an open environment – the meeting points, where the preliminary design is discussed. After, the employee communicates to the engineers the discussed product. From the engineer stations, the engineer sends the required data to the machine that after produces the desired object. The robots start the spectacle of production, which can be observed instantly from the costumers of the factory. The end product is then sold to the costumers in the commercial kiosks.

Urban Factory is in the centre of a dense urban area, open to the city and its citizens. It is a public building for development of customized objects, a hybrid that allows mixture of production, exhibition and trading and in that way creates more individual and personalized production of goods.

September 12, 2016October 14, 2019

A FACTORY TOWARD FULFILMENT

TECHINCAL IMAGE

TEAM: Naomi Rubbra, Leopold Taylor, Felix Yates – British – Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

We are a society engrossed in consumption. Our persistent pursuit of possession is a product of lies that we have been taught; where objects become the means to reach an instinctive, yet untenable goal of true happiness.

As the producer of artefacts, the factory plays a significant role in this process. But what if the factory set out to address the root cause of consumerism? What if a factory could transform the person from a mechanism of incessant consumption into a being of utter contentedness?

We propose a world in which consumerism becomes redundant. Where the factory doesn’t contribute to the problem, but becomes the solution. A Factory Toward Fulfilment takes stock from those brave enough to break away from the conventions of the status quo [Fig. 1].

For those who choose this route, our architecture provides an ascending assembly of desires – each floor an overindulgent excess [Fig. 2].

In this way, a moving conveyor-belt of society experience their materialist lifestyles to the extreme – drowning in fur coats, sick from eating too much cake, burning away a lifetime of video gaming in one fell swoop.

The output creates a world free from materialism. Is this not a simpler, and more beautiful place [Fig. 3]?

September 12, 2016October 14, 2019

MACHINAPOLIS

TEAM: Niko (Seong) Hur – South Korean

Where Machine = Architecture

With the abundance of technology, information, and resources readily available and the means to share such knowledge, everyone can basically manufacture and exchange goods anytime and anywhere. The scales of and the distances among the producer, consumer and the product are ever so small, to a point where a single individual is capable of making a product that he or she can then sell to another individual anywhere in the world.

As we move on from automated-machine filled structure of the last century to today’s 3d printers, the notion of “place of manufacture” or factory requires our attention.

The project pictures a world where products are no long mass produced. Rather, it celebrates the emergence of small and rapid prototyping that augments innovation and creativity. Modular assembly and aggregation of highly individualized units of manufacture will substitute the horizontal repetition of conventional warehousing and assembly line typology. Modules of related products (or non-related!) can be brought together to form larger aggregates, broken apart and reconfigured to create infinite number of combinations and possibilities to collaborate.

The modules, or the architecture, themselves have become the essential building parts of a giant social machine.

September 12, 2016October 14, 2019

OF DEAD AND BREAD