Tobias Klein

1 November 2012 – Landing in New York one day after Hurricane Sandy, we witness a week of total informational blackout. The Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, has come to a standstill below 32nd Street. We are listening to the silence of the closed electronic trading floors of Wall Street and observe herds of informational nomads, armed with their power-hungry laptops, searching for any electrical output. We are lost without mobile signals, emails or texts and cut off from global positioning systems; unable to manoeuvre without cybernetic feedback; out of our comfort zones by being disconnected from a system that typically caters to our needs. All activity has been suspended. This is the city’s confession to its subservient architectural relation to our electronic informational infrastructure. Meanwhile Barrack Obama is re-elected and we are stranded at the airport waiting for another storm to pass. 

Deeply rooted in the belief that the archi-tecture of today must face the challenges of a digitised and virtually immersed environment, Diploma 1 set out to design catalyst spaces and conditions that enhance and articulate digital space within -the urban frameworks between London and New York.

Investigating communication and system design, Gloria speculates on the absurdity of human dialogue in a technologically converted distant-communication network, while Kjetil proposes to use sensing devices to suggest that Heathrow’s Terminal 6 is a physical extension of the electronic cloud. Brian looks at how the transformation towards online courses and degrees may evolve into a new educational landscape typology situated in Mayor Bloomberg’s new zoning proposal. In project articulating architecture as constructs of desire and self-consciousness of a glutinous Schlaraffenland, Liza presents a digital vista of milk and honey while Goldshid explores the vanity of a self-obsessed global art market – the 24/7 televised post-industrial Warhol factory.

Through these projects we speculate upon prototypes for an architectural resolution and augment-ation of the networked electronic dream, questioning the infrastructural epitome of our time by defining architectural strategies for an informational behemoth inseparably amalgamated into every aspect of our life.

Unit Staff

Tobias Klein

 

Students

Lap Heng Fung

Kin Pong Ho 

Gloria Pou Wai Lei

Yuwon Kang 

Golshid Varasteh Kia

Soonil Kim 

Sergej Maier

Ranet Phanphensophon

Kevin Primat 

Kjetil Riegel

Liza Rudyk 

Luke Shixin Tan

 

Special thanks to 

Sam Joyce (Technical Studies consultant) 

Denis Vlieghe (Workshop Term 01/Interactive programming consultant) 

Dietmar Koering (Term 2 Workshop)

 

 

Critics 

Random International: Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch

Douglas Murphy 

Roberto Bottazzi 

Will Hunter 

Sam Joyce

Bryan Oknyansky 

Javier Castanon 

Matthew Butcher

Thomas Weaver

Kenny Kinugasa Tsui

Samantha Hardingham

Brett Steele 

Denis Vlieghe 

Carlos Villanueva Brandt

Mark Cousins

Sam Joyce

Ann-Sofi Rönnskog 

John Palmesino

Scanlab Projects: William Trossell and Matthew Shaw 

Michael Wiehart 

Alex Haw 

Madhav Kidao

Jon Ng

Francesca Hughes 

Javier Castañón

Christopher Pierce 

Ryan Dillon 

Jose Sanchez 

Sam Joyce 

Suraj Vithlani

Serafino Di Rosario

Yorgos Loizos 

Theodore Spyropolous 

Robert Stuart-Smith 

Nigel Coates 

Ricardo de Ostos 

Jon Goodbun 

Jeroen van Ameijde

Evan Greenberg  

Michael Weinstock  

Ben Parry

Peter McCoughey 

Alex MacKenzie 

Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu

Elliot Payne 

Andrew Beddard 

Gloria, Pou Wai, Lei

[ HUMANORAMA ]

This is a quest into the meaning of human communication.

In the Age of Connectivity, human communication is rapidly converting from the physical-based interaction into a digital mode of information exchange. Today, our perception and understanding of each other are largely built upon footage and news as broadcasted from different individuals.

Communication has become a personal information experience, where human interactions are reduced to the act of transmitting and receiving signals and messages through our information devices. Our communication interface has provided us a window through which we can observe and participate in the world from a distance, in our own room and our own dimension of individuality.

Departing from the nature of human conversation, going into the limit of human perception, the condition of absolute individuality, and exploring communication as a system of interfaces, circuitry, and manipulation of objective information to create subjective messages, here, architecture is used as a tool to depict, to understand, to criticize, and eventually to redefine a fundamental functionality in the human society and its underlying meaning.

The prototype of my informational revolution is a new form of conversation where a genuine connection and understanding between two human beings is established through a direct experience of each other’s subjective qualities, personality, and feelings rather than a reading of the objective words, messages, and information.

The 'Humanorama' is a new kind of communication infrastructure to be implemented alongside the current system of telecommunication as a way to insert a subjective dimension to our disembodied experience of information and of each other.