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Diploma Unit 2 Unit Staff:Anne Save de Beaurecueil Franklin Lee

Environmental Synchronisation:The Choreography of Flow

Diploma 2 will work on the synchronisation of both environmental and cultural flows, which involves defining a new aesthetic philosophy and social agenda for parametric environmental design. Specifically, the unit will work on articu-lating habitable-ground systems to alleviate the climatic, circulatory and social stagnation that afflicts many global cities. The goal is to create a fusion between architecture, infrastructure, landscape and contemporary art. The linear ‘highway-building’ proposed by Le Corbusier for cities in the developing world (including Rio de Janeiro in 1929) inspired a new speculation on the potential of habitable infrastructures. Yet, in certain cities, these ideas were later translated into striated monolithic urban developments that privileged high-speed elevated connections between macro-zones and often caused residual areas of decay and congestion. Reacting to this, the unit seeks to re-work the linear infrastructure–architecture hybrid so as to create an articulated, multiple-scale intermodality able to weave together local circulatory, program-matic and environmental systems. With the impetus provided by Brazil’s current economic boom, its hosting of the 2014 World Cup, and Rio de Janeiro’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics, students may work on architectural proposals for new programmes along Rio’s highly problematic elevated coastal highway, the ‘Via Perimetral’, which isolates the decaying port warehouses and docks from both the favelas and the established financial and historical centre. Alternatively, they can choose to work on any site worldwide to create articulated infrastructure-architectural hybrids to transform post-industrial and/or other partially dysfunctional urban landscapes.

The unit will extend its previous years’ development of ‘Environmental Ornamentation’ to encompass an ‘Ornamentation of Flow’. Choreography and three-dimensional attraction-field scripting will be used to synchronise multiple convoluted spatial sequences with sensorial plays of diffused light and shadow, ventilating breezes and animated water flows. Continuous-surface design strategies for creating circulatory, programmatic and spatial fluidity will be used in conjunction with compo-nent logics for structure, fabrication and refined environmental mediation. The unit will integrate parametric methodologies, environmental simulation and extensive physical modelling to calibrate iterative emergent spatial effects that

mediate structural, environmental and circulatory flows in order to transform monolithic formations.

Main Consultants:Lawrence Friesen, Generative Geometry Group, Buro Hap-pold; Adam Davis, Specialist Modelling Group, Foster + Partners; Joana Gonçalves, Univer-sity of São Paulo

Environmental Design; Sandro Tubertini, BDSP Environmental Consulting

Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee, based in both São Paulo and London, are directors of SUBdV architecture (subdv.com). They have practised, lectured and exhibited worldwide, most recently at the ‘Raw, New Brazilian Architecture’ in the 2008 London Festival of Architecture and the Beijing Architectural Biennale in October 2008. They have taught at the Pratt Institute Graduate School of Architecture in New York and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning (GSAPP). They hold masters degrees from the GSAPP and have both worked for Ken Yeang, while Anne has also worked for Zaha Hadid and Bernard Tschumi.

Pil Won Kim, Diploma 2 2007/08, Mediatheque light-landscapes