SCI-Arc
RoTo, Spring Studio 2024
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SCI Arc, Spring Studio 2024
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SCI Arc, Spring Studio 2023
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SCI Arc, Fall Studio 2012
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SCI Arc, Spring Studio 2009
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Quotes
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Sunrise Farm Hub + Owl Sanctuary
Bozeman, Montana
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
What if there was a place, with rural density and urban intensity, for
a re-grounding: hands in SOIL / caressing the microbiome
a re-conceptualizing: SCI-Arc’s other campus, a farm for cooperative and independent learning.
a re-purposing: surviving and improvising in the 21st C
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Project: general objectives
A self-sustaining, vertically (soil to sun) and horizontally (people) integrated settlement on rural lands.
This will be a multi-generational place for inventing and repurposing lives through collective-cooperative work, learning, and play.
It will be a community focused on land, soil, food, and architecture in context of a regenerative farm, marketplace, and entrepreneurial incubator,
informed by the principles of non-tillage and tech-based farmscape ecologies, slow food, circular economics, and universal learning.
We will be the architects, farmers, poets, and chefs, living in the present with a long-term vision of our evolutionary imperatives.
Sunrise Farm Hub will be a platform for your Architectural Minds, with aspirations of being a Polymath.
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Introduction
SFH+P is a food-focused agrarian settlement conceived as an informal learning hub and entrepreneurial cooperative, attracting people with diverse interests, literacies, and skill sets essential to the immediate task at hand, to share knowledge as they cooperatively imagine and create the social and physical architecture for a resilient local commune on rural lands operating as
a farm hub
a nature preserve
a research facility
a hub for Architectural Minds
a hub for universal life-long learning
a playground for creating a world that speculates on possible futures for working, playing, and learning
a vertically scaled and integrated world that imagines connecting the MICRO-BIOME to the SUN
This place exists to grow, harvest, cook, eat, sell, teach, and learn about farming, farmscapes, 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,
economies in the marketplace, and
the entanglements of natural and social ecosystems throughout.
The conceptual drivers for this project will be framed by the words of Wendell Berry, a poet/farmer/activist:
"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 and lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”
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Drivers
More specifically, the drivers will be principles and protocols of knowledge exchange from regenerative farming, farm-to-fork protocols, artisan craft (analogue and digital), circular economics, and making spaces and places based on principles of recombinatorial evolution applied to architecture.
(hint - the iPhone is an example of recombinatorial tech, and meiosis is an example in evolutionary biology)
(hint - Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur - Santa Fe Institute)
We begin with the formal and operational interpretations of recombinatorial evolution.
(merging and hybridizing agri-generic)
a place for architecture that will spatialize and formalize our aspirations.
a place to put farming, nature, and people back together again.
a place for re-grounding, re-centering, and re-booting.
a place to be in solitude and community.
a place to rediscover our hands’ relationship to our mind and 3rd eye (visual imagination)
a place where work is play, play is learning, and learning is survival.
a place to move fast in slow motion.
a place to become more aware of the human Umwelt, informed by our mentor OWL.
a place for speculating on possible futures where the Architectural Mind is the new OWL.
Prelude
Unrest and Uncertainty
Once again we begin another new year, 2024, buffeted by pervasive uncertainty and unrest at a scale and intensity that is at the edge of unpredictability and incomprehensibility.
Nature, cities, societies, institutions, and economies are shifting, altering our lives and to some extent our long-held dreams.
There is a strangeness to it all. The world we thought we were inheriting is no longer viable, and is not necessarily the world we want to live in.
Provocations 1
What if we could imagine a world at a smaller scale, in a rural place, that is closer to the ideal we long for?
What if we could imagine a place where people are attracted by common interests and passions?
What if we could imagine a place where the theory of economy is circular, open source, and steady state?
What if we could be the architects of this world, its buildings, and a learning system that fits the temperament and tempo of every one here?
Backstory
Upside to the downside
While in COVID lockdown, I rediscovered the value and virtues of silence, slowness, patience, spaces in between, and the aesthetics of cuisine (flavors, textures, colors, and patterns).
While in COVID lockdown, I wondered what the future of Architecture and Architects would be, re-reading the 2015 essay ‘A World Without Work’.
While in COVID lockdown, I wondered about the value of space in-between people and buildings, and a possible mini reverse migration from dense cities to small towns and open spaces.
While in COVID lockdown, I wondered about the complexity and scale of the problems that confront us, and if the expansive Architectural Mind was positioned to address them.
While in COVID lockdown, I wondered about the possibility of a new Renaissance, as was the case with the Black Plague preceding the 15th-17th C. Renaissance.
Place
Rural Lands
We took road trips to the countryside and began to read and learn more about rural lands.
Rural lands are 95% of the earths habitable land mass, historically populated by 70% of humanity.That number will drop to 30% in less than one generation.
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 asked myself.
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The weaving of our social fabric intensified with agrarian societies, which began to form 10,000 years ago with the arrival of agriculture. 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 rural places, once vital, rich in resources, soil, land, space, food, water, and energy, have succumbed to the large-scale shifts away from rural life and work brought on by industrialization and outward migrations, bringing them close to collapse.
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Provocations 2
What if we could leverage the reverse migration begun during lockdown, and re-imagine rural lands as having more than a supporting role for Cities?
What if it was possible to create a new type of settlement, where there was rural density and urban intensity.
Intention
Architectural Mind: Polymathy and Collective Intelligence
While in COVID lockdown, I wondered about the future of work and the future of Architecture and Architects.
I re-read an essay from 2015, A World Without Work, which ponders once again whether machines and machine learning will make workers obsolete.
In the past, we answered with our resilience fueled by consciousness, insight, wisdom, and our capacity to improvise and reinvent our lives and move forward, with technology once again serving as the wind at our backs.
The complexity of the problems that confront us leave us wondering whether any one specialist could comprehend or solve them.
Nope!
This is not the time for long held beliefs that we must become experts and specialists.
We now live in an unprecedented era of networked intelligence.
We must be generalists who can become specialists in the moment, to solve unexpected problems in inventive ways.
This is the era for cross-sector, trans-disciplinarian people with curious, open, and improvisational Architectural Minds (ARKmind).
SFH+P is conceived as an antidote for the displaced and misplaced people who are on their own, looking for a Third Space to actively sort things out and literally re-ground and reboot. Not home (first space), not work (second space), but rather a place to rediscover our hands’ relationship to our minds’ eye - visual imagination.
Objective
People who embody each of the disciplines listed below will be working at SFH+P:
Art, science, humanities, engineering, technology, communications, ecology, economics, and evolution.
Your task is to design their habitats and the places they meet in-between, connecting the places, the people, and their ideas. In between the clusters will be affinity spaces.
An affinity space is where individuals gather based on a shared interest, passion, or affinity.
These spaces provide a sense of belonging and allow people to connect, collaborate, and learn from one another. They foster a sense of community and belonging, providing a platform for individuals to connect and network.
SFH+P is conceived as an Affinity Space.
Provocation 3
What if an Architect was a humanist, an artist, a scientist, a technologist, an anthropologist, a farmer, a poet, a chef, and a monk?
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The PROJECT (in 2 phases)
Phase 1: Board Game - Story, Program, Connectivity
The more connections you make, the more points you score.
The creation of SFH+P begins with the board game.
Board games have been played since the dawn of humanity.
A game is a form of play and deep learning, with a challenge, goals, rules, and structured interactions.
Many early board games were created by mapmakers. Your game board will be a map of SFH+P, with pathways to connect with others to learn.
The more your characters connect, the more they learn, the more points are scored.
The overall objective is to become a Polymath (Renaissance person - i.e. Leonardo da Vinci).
The game will be your portal for interpreting Sunrise Farms assets from your POV:
its land, spaces, ecosystems, farmscapes, architecture, and interconnections, spatial and imaginary/conceptual.
and
developing a strategy for working to satisfy curiosity and creativity
and
developing concepts for structured and informal learning
and
developing maps for learning towards becoming a polymath
Write a narrative and illustrate with storyboards.
You will create 4 character-avatars with interests, intentions, and sense of purpose/direction.
a Visionary (silence)
a Teacher (patience)
a Warrior (passion)
a Healer (compassion)
a Fixer (invention)
All of the 4 characters are you.
Board game design is an iterative process.
Similar to our design-build process in architecture, iterative board game design is a play-based design process, emphasizing hands-on prototyping and play testing. Within an iterative design process, design visions are proposed, prototyped, tested, and modified based on the actual experience of playing the board game while it is in development.
1) Concept
Game design begins with a concept.
2) Experience
In any board game, the players' actual experience is the key.
Since you will be the architect for your own education, and the objective is to augment the cross-disciplinary architectural mind, your board game will be a map of the places, the events, and the people instrumental in your learning.
You score points as your learning network increases and your ArkMind is augmented.
3) Venue
The venue is the place of the game experience.
There will be 2 venues.
V1 is the SCI-Arc studio space —- V2 will be the conceptual place, Sunrise Farm Hub.
4) Elements
Games consist of four key elements: the players, the avatars (5), a goal (growing your ArkMind), the rules, and the aesthetic.
5) Theme
The theme is an idea that is central to a story, which can often be summed in a single word, defined by a narrative with characters, setting, plot, and conflict.
6) Mechanics
Game mechanics create the theme and consist of space, time, objects, actions, and rules.
7) Prototyping
Parameters
The primary challenge is connectivity (diversity), and integration (unity) of people, disciplines, skill sets, and literacies present on this site.
Once connected, the objective will be to understand and enhance systems of information and knowledge exchange.
Connect the microbiome to the soil, to plants, to insects, to people, to creatures, to biospheres, and to the sun.
The more connections you make and comprehend, the more points you score.
To create the game, you must write and illustrate the story in visual terms - manga-style storyboards.
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, economics in the marketplace, and a vision in the HQs. The conceptual drivers will be regenerative local community, regenerative farming, farm-to-table-to-fork, and slow food.
Schedule
28 days - you need to be playing the game on day 7 at the latest.
Week 1 - Choose your cluster, analyze it
Define your polymathic ArkMind, outline your clusters’ program activities and learning potentials
Week 2 - Consult with peers to design your maps of learning
Create your curriculum, story boards, mock-ups, design-build-play
Week 3 - Refine story boards and Game Board
Design-build-play-design-build-play……iterate
Week 4 - Design-build-play-play-play-play
Phase 2: The Architectural Project
Agri-Generic rural farm-building forms, spaces, and places in-between will be your assets to be interpreted.
The overall land plan, cluster plans, and buildings will serve as the location, size, scale, and scope.
Although these assets can be interpreted, they are the parameters and the limits.
Site Plan, Networks, Architecture
Farm-to-table + agrarian + farmscapes + agri-generic ark research + knowledge transfer + enterprise intrinsic to SFH+P
The site plan will be the map to set pathways for your Avatar to fulfill your aspirations to be the
architect for your cluster of buildings and your own education, with the goal of learning all that can be possibly be learned at Sunrise Farm, to be prepared for unpredictable challenges of the 21st C.
Objective: Architecture and strategic approaches
Q1 - What is agri-generic architecture?
Q2 - What is your Architectural Project?
Q3 - What is your concept of learning and polymathy?
Q4 - What is your strategy for each?
Q5 - What is the connection among the 1-2-3?
A learning objective this semester will be for you to continue your quest to discover an architectural voice.
This begins with you searching for the answers to these 5 questions.
You will be answering these questions as you do your work.
You will study the plan and ark of your cluster, then systematically deconstruct it, in principle and elementally,
testing your understanding as you re-employ it in your own way.
Your interpretive process will be draw-model-draw-model, interlaced with peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher conversations.
KEEP A NOTE/SKETCH BOOK - mandatory
then
analyze the architectural precedents given, the utilitarian forms and spaces of agri-generic architecture.
Form and space language, existing logic of their geometry, proportions, and hierarchies, their structure, construction logic, material systems.
then
catalogue them by components and 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 order, applied with consistency, rigor, precision, and craftsmanship.
Place, context, and site plan
SFH+P consists of 130 acres (50h), 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 at 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.
Approaches
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.
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 a responsive but dominant member in the relationship.
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.
OWLS - SFH will be a habitat for wildlife, especially Owls
WE have been obsessed with OWLs for thousands of years.
36,000 to be precise, ever since they were first represented in the caves of Chauvet in Southern France.
They have been a great subject for broadening human imagination and we have woven them into our stories and our art.
Owls carry symbolic significance in the human story due to their associations with wisdom, mystery, and intuition.
Across cultures, they often represent a connection to the unseen and the divine with symbolic ties with the subconscious and the mystical, enriching human narratives with layers of meaning and cultural symbolism.
Beyond symbolism, they play a crucial role in ecosystems, contributing in many ways to a balanced environment, making them significant in the broader human narrative of co-existing with nature.
SFH will be a sanctuary for all sentient creatures generally, but for Owls in particular,
and in turn a sanctuary for that part of your imagination that flourishes when exploring the architectural equivalent of magic realism.
OWLs will inform us and mentor us and entertain us.
SFH will be a sanctuary with multiple habitats throughout.
Also, there will be an OWLery, a place to meet and communicate with an OWLs,
IN SILENCE OR IN A DREAMS
