AT EXTREMES: Imbalance and Unpredictability as a Productive Practice

[bracket], Bracket 3 [at extremes], Essay, Lola Sheppard, Maya Przybylski, Politics and economics, Senseable Technologies, Territory and mobility

Archinet, Architectural boundary, Architectural explorations, Architecture’s challenge, Bracket, Built environment, Built landscape, Economic downturn, Emergent geographies, Environmental imbalances, Essay, Extreme conditions, Extreme environments, Financial crisis, Future projections, Global governance, InfraNet Lab, Landscape, Opportunities, Practice, Remoteness, Social dynamics, Soft Futures, Territorial dimension

https://actar.com/product/bracket-3/

This publication includes critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states.
We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive? Bracket [at extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?