Archinect - Features

New Ground II: Countryside 2030

2018-02-28T12:56:00-05:00

New Ground II, the second installment of Archinect’s two-part feature series on the contemporary countryside, is playfully set in rural California in the year 2030. Certain trends Christine Bjerke and I dug into in last month’s feature, New Ground I: Advancing the Countryside, have been extrapolated to present a future pastoral landscape, recognizable yet markedly different than that which we might encounter today. We discuss this future outlook with Benjamin Bratton, director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego and author of The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty and Martin Abell from the agricultural robotics firm Precision Decisions, the first company to farm a field without human intervention.

New Ground I: Advancing the Countryside

2018-01-31T09:50:00-05:00

Across the urbanized world, the contemporary countryside is a paradox. While media attention is absorbed by the city, many rural regions are experiencing accelerating change due to increased automation, the emergence of megastructures and new self-learning systems, all of which are reshaping the terrain. The divisive political events of 2017 exhibited just how much today’s countryside has grown apart from the city both ideologically and spatially. To kick off 2018, in New Ground I, the first of a two-part feature series co-authored with Christine Bjerke from In-Between Economies, we will briefly explore a selection of major shifts that have influenced how the countryside operates today. We check in with rural demographer and sociologist Ken Johnson from the University of New Hampshire and Ivan Sergejev, an architect exploring the potential of the data center typology. In addition, will be tapping into the latest research from international architecture practice OMA*AMO, who have bee...

Between the home and the market: an interview with Christine Bjerke from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-28T12:03:00-04:00

“The economy of the home becoming an investment culture instead of a savings culture disrupts the idea of very specific gendered roles in Japanese society,” states the Copenhagen-based architect Christine Bjerke during an interview conducted as part of Archinect’s Next Up: Floating Worlds. Bjerke’s project (On the Floating World of the) FX Beauties, which inspired the name of the event, derives from her research into the spatial implications of the work of the FX Beauties, a club of Japanese housewives who engage in day-trading on foreign exchange markets.