First Award | Housing (Upto 5 Floors) (Concept)
Firm Name: Estudio Santander
Participant Name: Alex Santander
Country : United States
How to create within architecture alternate/speculative realities to escape/exit from the globalized contemporary neoliberal capitalist structures?
We have been, architecture in parallel, since the 1980s subsumed by the anxieties of an infinite cycle that gyrates incessantly on the same axis of production and consumption. Time has been completely colonized by these forces. Time is “invested” in acquiring new skills or knowledge so that we may be “marketable” to obtain a higher return/salary on investment. Soon we find that our ability to produce has expired and we must repeat the cycle of self-actualizaion in order to remain relevant consumers. We have become capital stock, laborers of the non-stop 24/7 lifestyle. Time has been conolized, financialized and utilized as a tactic of enslavement. We have become capital stock. Equally, architecture has become a mere neoliberal lifestyle product marketed for easy consumption. The easily digestable and spectacular have emerged as the aesthetic of neoliberalism.
Emancipation from such forces is needed. Urbanistically, relationships are being absorbed into a continuum of urban/cultural sameness and a sort of new globalized tabula rasa; the smooth teflon-like top layer that covers a foundation of dense petrified strata of history makes it possible to re-think unexpected opportunities for re-orientations within the contemporary reality.
If we must have a sustainable future it is not a romantic pastoral return to the past. The past is no more. Likewise, at the present there is no true sustaintability within the neoliberal reality.
Our investigation sets to explore a speculative possibility: Pause space. Pause space seeks a glitch, where self-cultivation is possible.
A pause not to stop such accelerations, but to re-orient them into speculative possibilites. Pause space is an escape/exit strategy. A pause to the infinite in which time is liberated. A pause space where it is conducive to the radical act of contemplation/thinking in order to re-imagine our emancipated future on the Outside to the infinite.
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