If one discounts the noble efforts of beavers, birds and bees, there has been one constant throughout the history of architecture, one common link from the earliest cave alterations and primitive huts through the Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis, to the Crystal Palace and the Frank Gehry-designed UTS Business School. Whether house or tomb, factory or school, cistern or substation, architecture has always been designed with human occupation in mind. Always, that is, until now…
Globalised consumer society and technological developments have conspired to produce a new type of architecture entirely devoid of occupants. Situated on the outskirts and staffed by robots, these server farms, fulfilment centres, archives, seed banks, drone ports and power stations are the architectural harbinger of an eventual post-human age. So how does one attempt to design architecture without occupants?
In his 1967 poem, the American poet Richard Brautigan imagined ‘a cybernetic meadow/where mammals and computers/live together in mutally/programming harmony’. In this technological utopia, this ‘cybernetic ecology’, dehumanising and apocapyptic Cold-War technologies were reimagined as repurposed for peaceful and just communitarian and countercultural ends (Brautigan was a denizen of San Francisco in the sixties).
Taking this alternative vision as a starting point, and with a little architectural help from Reyner Banham, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, SITE, Cedric Price, Superstudio and OFFICE, students in this studio subject explored promising post-human building typologies and reimagined architectural representation for non-human eyes. Architecture Without Occupants wilfully recast historical architectural treatises as possible blueprints for the future, investigating the role played by Albert Kahn, Henry Ford’s architect, in inventing Modernism’s formal and spatial repertoire, and considering the implications of a world, in Brautigan’s words, ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’.
