V&A Showcase

Critical Journal Ep.17

I am part of the environmental investigation group for a series of conferences and exhibitions in late May at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It will suppose extra work but is good to get in touch with other people from other fields and this will obviously enrich me personaly and professionally for my project and life.

Marie Rouillon

Anne Frobeen

Bharat Bhargava

Amy Pliszka

Miriam Ribul

Minhyung Lee

Elena Nunciata

The first exercise within my Environmental Group is to find connections between our work and develop that bullet points in the speech of our project. The points that we discused are:

Expanding our notion of space:

The concept of what we consider our home has change radically. If we look back at the begining of the last century Frank Lloyd Right and his organic architecture still considered an element like the fireplace as the centre which houses. Later on in the 60s society lacated the radio and years later the TV as the center point of their households where the families came together to share an activity. Nowadays the Internet and the computer have invaded our homes, plating an important role in how we experience life and how we interact within the society.

Making it physical:

We can be called cyborgs now by several anthropologists. We do not need to look for a far distance future, 2001 Space Odyssey is here now. Mobile phones and laptops enhance or metal capacities making us able to be in two different places at the same time and making our brain to work in a multitasking way. Building this fast forward utopia has made more tangible the thin line that separate it from the tecno-distopia point of view, making more clear our need to slow down.

Engaging with the familiar:

Future issues of overpopulation summed up to the evolution of technologies will create a new concept of citizen and even of family. We are more than ever connected but also social networking and the internet is making us develop more our individualities. Toyo Ito said that the future of the house as the family is conceived right now is a sum of individuals, a common space will disappear as we now it right now to evolve into a concatenation of private spaces. Typologies that will help to enhance this individuality will find the market in this not far distance future scenario.

Temporary experience:

This fast society in which we are immersed in is making things to have an extreme sense of temporality. Period of life are stretched as people have to live in their parents houses for longer periods of time or singularities appear as new family typologies. In this feeling of not belonging to a place, technology represent that threshold where people are looking for comfort, and within communities they find the anchors that remind them the feeling of what is home. Is no longer a unique physical place, is the sum of different spaces and the introduction of different times where thank you to technical improvements, nor distances or other physical matter will care. (concept of simultaneus time)