ZEN × Architecture
SuperStudio 2
Professor Aoífe Houlihan Wiberg, Professor of Architectural Design
Ciaran Mackel, Senior Lecturer in Architecture
Smart Cities &
Porous Borders
Urban Polyvalency: the search for Complex Ordinary in an ethical, sustainable environment
The recent Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change report states urgent changes are needed to cut the risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty. And that we need to act fast and decisively.
Increasing occurrence of weather extremes, the pace of globalisation and rapidly increasing urbanisation, particularly in developing regions, put pressures on the built environment. Existing policy frameworks and strategies focus on minimising and eliminating energy-use and subsequent carbon emissions from building and construction activities but place less emphasis on the need to improve the architectural quality of buildings and the urban environment or, to maintain, or even improve, people’s health and wellbeing.
‘Cities worldwide have been becoming increasingly ‘smart’ through the sophisticated use of data centres to manage everything from traffic control to pollution and waste management.’ We will partner with colleagues across Ireland and Norway to study what it can mean to be a Smart City, engaging academia and industry — our profession — to help the shift to a zero-carbon built environment. We will engage with a range of speakers and will have involvement (and, hopefully, impact) in live Smart City projects.
New architectural typologies are emerging like mega-structure data centres. New typologies creating new problems. By 2030 Eirgrid, responsible for Ireland’s electricity grid, forecasts that data centres alone will consume 36% of the total energy demand on the island.
In 2017, the Irish Government put forward a bill to re-designate data centres and other data infrastructure as strategic infrastructure… categorically identical to our roads and bridges. This is the merging of architecture and data infrastructure.’
Not surprising, then, that the role and voice of the architect is changing. And in scenario of climate emergency and change, where people die and are made homeless by climate catastrophes; where junk mail has a bigger carbon footprint than the aircraft sector, when the architectural mega-structures of unpopulated data-storage facilities will consume one-third of Ireland’s energy use, what are the ethical and physical implications for the architectural profession: for us all as citizens?
This studio will investigate parallel streams of urbanism and energy use and GHG emissions /reductions in the fullest understanding of sustainability and in context of Smart Cities. Semester 1 will gather information related to Smart Cities, ZEN, definitions of key concepts and policies, and consider case-studies and propose concepts and strategies for a new urban-edge typology. Semester 2 will focus on housing and study zero-emission neighbourhoods and the typology of the terrace dwelling, considering built examples, including model case-study buildings and we will design new housing typologies, including adaptive re-use. In the words of Peter Marklï we are seeking an architecture that is prompted by evaluations and analysis but speaks at an emotional level.
The studio will explore polyvalency, the complex, ordinary hybridity that makes cities and places enduring, exciting and challenging. The focus of the work of an architect is always human experience.