Unit 13
Second Nature | Shared Futures

Unit Leader: Claudia Morgado
Unit Tutor: Ruby Mungoshi
Unit Assistant: Azraa Gabru

The world has been weighed and measured and has been found to be heavy. Human-made material, concrete, asphalt, metal and plastic, now equals the weight of all life on Earth. The world around us is increasingly engineered; the artificial is overtaking the natural as construction grows. This confrontation brings with it curious creations and formations. A new geological substance discovered in 2012, plastiglomerate, is a composite of rock, sand, and plastic. This mash-up material is evidence of our impact on the world and a marker of the  current geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This hybrid stone unites the human with; “the currents of water; with the breaking down, over millennia, of stone into sand and fossils into oil; ... with the refining of that fuel ... into plastic, into garbage” (Robertson, 2016). It is a physical representation of the connections between all matter, from the micro to macro, across time. The relevant scale now moves from the person to the planetary.

It is hard to think of architecture without thinking of growth. The discipline is continually in the process of making and remaking the material form of our world. We accept that there is always something else to build. The reality, however, is that this untethered growth is unsustainable. It is underpinned by continuous and accelerating processes of extraction and commodification of a finite (and shrinking) supply – the natural capital of the Earth. We only need to look at  our current reality to see the effects of a ‘growth above all else’ approach. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of the current capitalist paradigm, forcing us to embody a prolonged state of uncertainty and insecurity. Previous orthodoxies of typology and programme have become blurred as our homes now function as our offices, our playgrounds, our restaurants and cinemas, our churches, and our schools.

Theme parks become vaccine centres. Parking lots, hospitals. The human endeavour is simultaneously expanding while it collapses and folds in on itself. Learning from where we have been and  where we are heading, what could a future based on post-growth be?

Sharing is a key characteristic of a degrowth economy. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2030 all products will have become services. “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house.  I don’t own any appliances or any clothes...” writes Danish MP Ida Auken. Additionally, in 2030 the youth population of Africa is projected to make up 42% of the global youth population. This is the space of inquiry. How can we imagine post-growth worlds, post-extractive realities, in a country and continent with the youngest populations of the world, and one whose global appeal seems to be based on cheap and abundant resource extraction? Using sharing as the primary operation of our future architecture, this year we ask students to design a Library. A library is an institution of sharing, a collective repository, and a living resource. How can we expand this typology to ask critical questions of individual and mutual responsibility, and stimulate the collective construction of both our practice and our future? We mobilise research, invention, collaboration, and imagination to this task, where each project becomes a conglomeration of architectural materials and new materials – spaces, forms, programmes – positing new ways for us to inhabit our world together. If the world is something we make, how can  we make it differently?