SCI-Arc

Sunrise Farm Preserve + Hub                                                          

Bozeman, Montana

Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Roto Studio VSf24                                a re-grounding : hands in the SOIL caressing the micro-biome

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The Architecture of possible futures for a small human settlement will be re-imagined on rural lands for inventing and repurposing lives through collective work, learning, and play, focused on farm-scape ecologies and informed by the principles of slow food, concepts of circular economics, and the aesthetics of re-combinatorial architectural evolution.

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Prelude : Unrest and Uncertainty

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We begin another school year, buffeted by pervasive uncertainty and unrest, at a scale and intensity, never before experienced. Nature, cities, societies, institutions, and economies are in shreds, dramatically altering our lives, and our long-held dreams. There is a strangeness to it all. The world we thought we were inheriting is broken.

We are getting a close look at failure, and even closer look at the nature of our humanity, one and many.

We are temporarily un-grounded, de-centered, and at the threshold of spinning out of control.

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While in lockdown, I rediscovered the value and virtues of silence.

slowness, patience, space, social distancing dance moves, the aesthetics of food (flavors, textures, and patterns), the pleasures and wonders of nature, the longing for friendship and human contact, but most of all, the value of life itself.

Yes, there is an upside to the downside we are experiencing.

Troubled times like these are perfect for deep reflection and creative speculation,

especially re-imagining a world where things could be different, a world we want to live in.   

Each of you will propose one of these re-imagined worlds.

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Backstory : Rural Lands

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While in lockdown, I thought of open spaces and fewer people. (social distancing).

We took road trips to the countryside. I began to read more about rural lands.

Rural lands are 95% of the earths habitable land mass, in the past, they were populated by 70% of humanity.

That number, by 2050, a generation, will drop to 30%. Vacant land and open space will continue to grow.

Cities occupy 5% of the habitable landmass, and in a generation will have 70% of humanity.

What’s lost and what’s gained, I ask myself.

Our social fabric comes from agrarian societies which began to form 10,000 yrs. ago.

Agriculture began to bring humans together into larger and denser communities. The farms, settlements, and communities, were eventually defined by mutuality of interests and shared lives. These places, once vital, rich in resources, soil, land, space, food, water, and energy, have succumbed to the large-scale shifts in rural life and work, brought on by industrialization and outward migrations, bringing them close to collapse. What if we re-imagined them as more than a supporting role for Cities?

 

Introduction : Sunrise Farm Hub + Preserve

SFH+P is a food focused agrarian settlement, conceived as an informal learning hub and entrepreneurial cooperative attracting people with diverse interests, intelligences, literacies and skillsets, and civic imagination essential to the immediate task at hand. This project imagines, on rural lands, a resilient local community, operating as a farm hub, a nature preserve, research facility, enterprise zone, and a playground for creating an imaginary world that speculates on possible futures for working, playing, and learning. This place exists to grow, harvest, cook, eat, sell, teach, and learn about farming, farms-capes, and foods’ role in the formation and well-being of a local community.

Locals, nomads, and travelers come here, to work cooperatively and learn collectively, as they unpack science in the fields, humanities in the kitchens and dining rooms, economics in the marketplace, and social ecosystems in the HQs.

The conceptual drivers for our quest to conceive such a place will be regenerative farming, farm to table to fork, slow food, artisan craft, circular economics, and the formal and operational interpretations of re-combinatorial evolution.  This will be,

a place where principles of life-long learning and knowledge sharing are valued.

a place to integrate farming, nature, and people.

a place for using our hands to play with soil and grow food to share with others?

a place where work is play, play is learning, and learning is survival.

a place to move fast in slow motion.

 

Architectural Mind: Polymathy and Collective Intelligence

While in lockdown, I wondered what the future of Architecture and Architects would or should be.

We now live in an unprecedented era of networked intelligence.

Explosions of data, information, and knowledge have made it difficult to keep up with what’s happening and what’s known.  This breeds cultures of specialization, which is no longer tenable.

While in lockdown, I thought about the complexity of the problems that confront us wondering if any one specialist could comprehend or solve them, like the lone ranger? Nope!

An antidote to specialization and the vehicle for our survival is the Architectural Mind.

It is naturally curious, creative, cross-disciplinary, and a quintessential problem solver with a constructive mindset. 

 

Research

Art, science, engineering, technology, media, humanities, ecology

Make a list of all the different types of people who come to Sunrise Farms,

what do they know, and what are their skills

What is a Polymath?

Who is a Polymath?

What is the meaning of collective intelligence?

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The PROJECT

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Phase 1 : Board Game (3wks)

               Story, Program, Connectivity

You will create an imaginary world as you design a board Game.

The 3 characters you create as avatars are you at 3 different ages. Each has something unique to offer the soil, and each other. Each is here to overcome their disorientation from the lockdown. Each is here to work, learn, eat, and transfer knowledge. Their objective will be to re-image their lives and this place, as they re-connect with the land and each other. The challenge of the game is to construct a life for life-long learning beginning by building a network and curriculum to satisfy aspirations of becoming a POLYMATH. You will be the architect of their/your education, mapping the pathways to reaching this goal. Along the way you can improvise, making adjustments over time, by participating with others in this ecologically minded, food focused community, conceived as an applied research and demonstration hub, nature preserve, and entrepreneurial cooperative business venture.

 

The game will be your portal for interpreting the program and creating a design for the Sunrise Farms

The primary challenge, is connectivity(diversity) and integration (unity) of people, disciplines, skillsets, and literacies present on this site.

Connect the micro-biome to soil to plants, to insects, to people, to creatures, to biospheres, and to the sun.

The more connections you make, the more points you score.

To create the game, you must write and illustrate the Story.

You will write a new story that explores the rhythms of work, community, and wild things.

“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story — the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it — is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story.”   Thomas Berry

The Story describes your vision for life in this place at this time, with these people.

They are here to work together, and learn from each other, about growing food and a commune. Along the way, they re-discover the benefits of the open spaces and natural resources of rural lands. Working cooperatively, they will unpack science in the fields, humanities in the kitchens and dining rooms, and economics in the marketplace and a vision in the HQ’s. The conceptual drivers will be regenerative local community, regenerative farming, farm to table to fork, and slow food.

 

As you work on the game, you need to answer the following questions,

What is the story of Agriculture?

What is the meaning of Agrarian Society?

What is this place?

Who are these people and what is their story?

What is their relation to each other and the natural world present here?

What are the pathways that connect them?

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Phase 2 : The Architectural Project

                Site Plan, Networks, Architecture

                farm to table + agrarian research + knowledge transfer + enterprise

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Objective : Architecture and strategic approaches

What is the architecture of this place?

What is your Architectural Project?

A learning objective this semester will be for you to continue your quest to discover an architectural voice. This begins with you asking the question What is your Architectural Project?

You will be answering this question as you do your work.  

define your architectural interests and choose an ‘aesthetic system’ to emulate.

You will choose your precedent system represented by the body of work of a certain Architect,

You will study it and then systematically deconstruct it, in principle, and elementally, testing your understanding as you re-employ it in your own way.

Then

You will begin analyzing the architectural precedents given, the utilitarian forms and spaces of agrarian architecture. Analyze their form and space language, study the existing logic of their geometry, proportions and hierarchies, their structure, construction logic, material systems and then deconstruct them into elements for deployment in form-space language you want to pursue.  

Your success is contingent on the degree to which you understand strategies,  parameters,  principles, and rules, with a nod to formal principles of proportion, hierarchy, patterns, and geometric order,                                                                                      

applied with consistency, rigor, precision, and craftsmanship. 

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place, context, and site plan

SFH+P consists of 135acres (55h), remaining from larger agricultural holdings that have been increasingly subdivided as the city of Bozeman has expanded. It is located a mile from Montana State University campus and less than two miles from downtown Bozeman, a fast sprawling third-tier city. Bozeman is positioned in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s northern flank. Geographically it is situated at a wildlife crossroads. This property has two branches of a healthy spring creek and a wetland zone. This property has unique natural assets that have been identified and mapped, as the basis of making the site plan. Open spaces, have become clusters of places and buildings, shaped by trees, and topography, bounded and connected by water courses, ponds, wetlands, and animal habitats. Each cluster will be connected to other clusters formally, spatially, and programmatically. You will work cooperatively in pairs to figure this out.

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Architecture gives form to Architecture

without context

autonomous

Architecture can be thought about and worked on with autonomy, with its’ own histories and theories.

The purity of any form -space language is best comprehended in abstraction independent of any context.

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Architecture gives form to Life

shaping context

responsive

Architecture can be thought about and worked on with the objective of shaping the context it is a part of, being responsive but dominant member in the relationship.

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Life gives form to Architecture

adapting to context

inflective

Architecture can be thought about and worked on with an objective of becoming ‘invisible’, only seen when you look twice.

Its integrity is in proportion to its virtual transparency. The strength of the relationship comes from reciprocal inflection.

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fire it up ready to go!

 

Quotes

 

Evolution made us a learning machine,

collectively, we are a learning organism,

We live to communicate, to connect, to transfer all that we know,

in many ways and many forms.

sometimes in silence,

by example of what we do.

eyes and hands expressing we imagine,

Sometimes we tell stories, and illustrate them,

So, we can see outside our head, what we we see inside.

Roto

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To make the world work for 100% of humanity

in the hottest possible time

Through spontaneous cooperation

Without ecological offense

Or the disadvantage of anyone

Buckminster Fuller

architect / engineer / geometrician / cartographer / philosopher / futurist / inventor / writer

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Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Leonardo da Vinci

Architect / artist / inventor

 

to walk through a garden is to be in the midst of the realities of things, to be immersed in the primal awareness not just of nature’s beauty, but the eternal cycle of the seasons, of life, death and rebirth. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed modern technological life had alienated us from the “dark maternal, earthy ground of our being”. He grew his own vegetables and argued that “every human should have a plot of land so that their instincts can come to life again”.

William Wordsworth

Poet

 

Community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature. A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests.  But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”

Wendell Berry

Poet / farmer / activist

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Connect your current knowledge to the disciplines listed here.

How many are on your list?

How many would you like to have on your list?

How do you expand your list with this project?

 

What knowledge and what skills would you need to be a successful participant of Sunrise Farm?

What disciplines do the people attracted to SFH+P have?

How can they work together and share knowledge?

 

How many disciplines did Leonardo da Vinci have?

Invent a fictional character who works and learns on SFH+P who is a Polymath.

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SELECTED STUDENT WORK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sam Lay

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SUNRISE FARM at RoTo Architects

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RETURN TO TOP

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