Dessau International Architecture Graduate School – 2016

Students
Haiman Ivan, Ngeng Dong Haur, Bardhyl Kasami, Larissa Krannich, Juan Lee, Anastaija Palagina, Arian Sefiu, Zachary Wilson, Matthew Wong

Brief

WHITE NOISE, is a fuzzy always-existing noise in the background, it is a mish-mash, a higgledy- piggledy hogposh – neither definable nor de-constructible. WHITE NOISE is the audible superimposition of traffic, people moving, talking, the humming noise of computers, LED lights shivering or waves of all kinds, the twittering of birds, the rubbing of leaves against each other, somebody singing, somebody cooking, somebody praying, playing piano and all other noises our human audible system can receive. In short, white noise is an essential part of our human habitat, urban, rural and extra-terrestrial.

Continuing research into human ecologies in the age of the Anthropocene, the studio Codes in the Clouds X investigated into the notion of WHITE NOISE in our technospheric urban environment. Berlin, in this respect, serves as a prime example, as a laboratory to start understanding the relationship between WHITE NOISE and the urban environment, the architecture we live in.

PROJECT

Berlin provides us with a multitude of physical, tectonic, culturally specific and material spaces and surface – each of them furnished with its own individual repertoire of WHITE NOISE. Our aim was to develop a series of design strategies, architectural principles and building typologies through a variety of analyzing techniques, dissecting WHITE NOISE on selected sites in Berlin. Projects engaged with the continuous transformation from an analog to a digital city and from a static environment to a dynamic flux of behavior – with a cybernetic city for the future that is sneaking around the corner.

Watched over by Machines of loving Grace, Richard Brautigam, 1960s, California:
1. I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony
like pure water touching clear sky.

2. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms

3. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.