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Thursday, 24 August 2006 | Levent OZLER
The Self Sufficient Housing Book
In the early 20th century, the concept of "dwelling" was defined as a "machine for living", a reference to a new way of understanding the construction of inhabitable spaces that characterized the Machine Age.
Today, a century later, we face the challenge of constructing a sustainable or even self-sufficient dwelling, now a living organism that interacts with its environment, exchanging resources, and which functions as an entirely self-sufficient entity.
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia presents a selection of entries presented during the 1st Advanced Architecture Contest: Self-Sufficient Housing.
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/4892/
The Self Sufficient Housing Recopilation
Advanced Knowledge, Lucas Cappelli
http://www.iaacat.com
The two principal features of the Internet being that it is a horizontal technology that lays the foundations of information and communicating, we are dealing with a society that has the autonomous capacity for cultural creation marked by an increasing dissolution of the systems of bureaucratic control that have previously existed.
It is, then, a flat technology, free of specialization with no barriers to its assimilation, enabling new mechanisms for the absorption of information that serve as a means to solve problems on the basis of which to generate new knowledge. Whereas traditional forms of knowledge production address and solve problems in a context governed by the interests of a specific community and are disciplinary, homogeneous and hierarchical, this new form develops in the context of application and is transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, flexible, transitory and socially responsible and reflective.
This is the birth of a new form of knowledge production that includes a larger body of practitioners, ephemeral but linked in time, heterogeneous but interconnected, all working on a specific, delimited issue.
The scope of this issue also supposes the use of a transdisciplinary approach, since the resolution of these difficulties reaches beyond the individual discipline that constitutes them, placing the discoveries made beyond the confines of a single specific order and removing the need for the latter as a point of reference that provides validation.
This new process also supposes the presence of new mechanisms of diffusion. The large number of actors involved - with their very different backgrounds of discipline and region - greatly increases subsequent diffusion and, as a result, the production of new knowledge multiplies exponentially as it advances towards new contexts of application and use.
The Advanced Architecture Contest suggests the verification of these propositions applied to a practical development exercise of new self-sufficient architectonic symbols; proving in proposals in consideration of all of the confines of our planet, that by using this medium, they expect to reach exponential repercussion, impacting their effect and provoking reflection on a subject that should stop being continually postponed, as if it is the "sustainable destruction" and the persistent abuse of our environment, with the final goal of implanting a new human consciousness with respect for itself.
Behind this concern is the recognition that new knowledge production can take place through the desire to formulate relevant questions to address a hypothetical international strategy that will direct the way we use information toward the design of less self-destructive, more self-sufficient constructions.
All the projects presented here implicitly address this issue.
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