Design Studio Cecilia Chiappini Collective Spaces and Infrastructures and Design Studio Livia de Bethune Health City (maib14-Bruno Peeters)
Open Lecture by External Jury Members: January 10th, 2018. 12-13h, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels, Auditorium.
LUKAS PAUER: Staging Facts on the Ground: On Growing Islands Growing Nations.
Chotima Ag-ukrikul: From Eatscape to Landscape Notes on Livable City Making
In the frame of the Final Review of the Design Studios on January 10th, 2018, Lukas Pauer, and Chotima Ag-Ukrikul are invited to act as external jury members. As part of the programme, they will give a lecture on their work. Lukas* will show an extreme case of infrastructures/collective spaces interrelations in South China Sea and Chotima** will show her research on urban practices generated by eating together.
*SHORT ABSTRACT The resource-rich and contested territorial condition of a marginal sea that is part of the Pacific Ocean serves as an ideal site to situate the role and agency of architectural design practice within a contemporary politico-economic discussion: throughout the South China Sea, seemingly banal architectural objects are used to construct artificial islands through which nation-states presently claim sovereignty of evidently significant scale. Rocks, shoals, reefs, banks, cays, and other low-tide elevation maritime landscape features are transformed into territorial footprints to assert ownership over fishing grounds, oil, and gas believed to lie beneath the hotly contested borderlands. Across Southeast Asia, the impending threat of resource scarcity has led governments to consolidate control of strategic reservoirs for geoeconomic reasons. In order to secure resources and tackle unilateral strains on local markets, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines have engaged in a conflict of political contestation. The performative nature and intertwined relationships between the environment, ecology, politics, economics, and business reveal the South China Sea as staging ground for politico-economic exercises in nation-making, land reclamation, and remote inhabitation.
Lukas Pauer is a licensed architect, urbanist, and educator. He is the Founding Director of the Vertical Geopolitics Lab (http://vg-lab.net/mission), an un-disciplined non-profit think-tank and speculative design practice dedicated to the interrogation of cross-scalar agency to expose hidden systems and intangible agenda within the built environment. Currently pursuing a practice-led studio-based PhD AD (City-Architecture) at the Architectural Association with P. V. Aureli, Lukas holds an MAUD from Harvard University and an MSc Arch from ETH Zürich.
**SHORT ABSTRACT The practice of eating together creates a shared environment which becomes a meeting place in a locality. It is called Eatscape in this thesis. This talk will focus on the relationship between the everyday practice of eating together and the built environment. How architects and urban designers can approach city design from the everyday urban vernacular where people and everyday activity are essential material agent for liveable city making.
Chotima Ag-ukrikul (Thai /Dutch architect). Her professional background is in education, architecture, urban design and scientific research. She was trained as a commercial designer at the Ming Chuan College, Taipei Taiwan in 1992. Her architecture education was at both the Mackintosh School of Architecture Glasgow in 1997 and the Technical University Delft in 2003. She has her professional practice in both design and education in Europe (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Germany, Sweden and the UK) as well as in south-east Asia (Thailand and Taiwan). She also served as design studio instructor at the KULeuven at Brussels and Ghent, Belgium between 2006-2015. In 2018, she is expecting to defence her PhD thesis at the Department of Architecture and civil engineering Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg Sweden.
Final Review: January 10th, 2018. 11-18h, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels, A20/A30.
The jury will be completed by Vincent Chukwuemeka, who is an IRO Doctoral Scholar at the Department of Architecture, University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. His research is on informal dynamics and self-organisation processes of urban growth in cities of sub-Saharan Africa; with focus on Onitsha Markets, Nigeria (https://chukwuemeka.net/phd/-Vincent visited the studio, performed desk critics and lectured on November 15th) and by Ana Julia Claro, who is an Architect teaching and researching at FADU-UNL Argentina, on complex forms and alternative geometries in the design process, within design studios. The Final Review is also open to the public and will take place in rooms T20 and T30 from 11:00h to 18:00h.