METABOLIC INTERDEPENDENCIES: UNPACKING THE TERRITORIES THAT SUPPORTS URBAN LIFE
Guest Faculty: Daniel Ibañez

Ironically, architects, urban designers and landscape architects have an important impact in the transformation of broader and generally far away landscapes that today are abstracted through the commodification and metabolic rifts of the resources that presuppose building and urbanization. While designers typically specify materials for buildings and landscapes towards performative and aesthetic ends in a given site, materials are linked through spatial networks that are as real as any designed building or landscape. When designers isolate design in this way, we are limited to the unwarranted, overdeveloped, disproportionate, and misplaced forms of geometric and technocratic specificity. This oversight means that we habitually occlude ecologically and architecturally powerful forms and formations from design, at scales from the component to the entire territory. It also imposes profound epistemological limitations on design. This workshop focuses on trans-scalar analytical approach for this otherwise schizophrenic material culture of contemporary design. We assert that the typically separated realm of material production is constitutive of, contiguous with, and generative for design. We will engage rather than occlude these complex relations, unpacking the entangled relationship between the sites of material extraction, circulation and accumulation as part of a bigger ‘urbanization’ question today.