Global Design New York University: Spotlight: doxiadis+

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Spotlight: doxiadis+ - "Landscapes of Cohabitation"

Antiparos Island, Greece

The Aegean landscape is the synthesis of physical and cultural-historic forms and processes in a dynamic system of emergent self-organization. Complex patterns emerge from simple conditions as they overlap and influence each other. After thousands of years of existence, these beautiful landscapes now face extensive transformations, as the tourist economy is replacing that of agriculture and herding. The historic equilibrium is diverse and attractive, but also extremely fragile, sustainable only as long as the economic and cultural practices that formed it continue to operate. Seeking the new equilibria required by the changing uses, this project attempts to reverse the trend of transformation as destruction by strategizing transformation as a new synthesis, a cohabitation.

Landscapes of Cohabitation | doxiadis+

No comments:

Post a Comment

MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."