Project:
Techno Monks

About

• Project description

  If corporate campuses and industrial cities are counterproductive urban spaces and landscapes, it’s because tech companies build in its own image, as a global island and not as production commons of the place they grow from.

  Take for instance Silicon Valley, a place that does not reflect the innovation that is driving the region. Oddly it looks instead like 1950’s. Looking at aerial views of midcentury campuses like the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs next to contemporary ones like Apple, it’s nearly impossible to tell the midcentury structures from the 21st-century ones.

  The contemporary productive city is also much more than urban farming and beehives in roof terraces. It is about an architecture and city structure that reflects the innovation behind the region’s growth. It is about empowering citizens so even small one-person companies can have access to high tech equipment and facilities.

  Despite its clear reference to the site, the resultant model is sufficiently potent to generate its own organizational and regulating ‘forces’ knitting the sweater while the wool is still growing:

  What if small scale artisans could rent industrial robots currently not easily available for non-industrial production?
  What if a landscape of technified manufacture could trigger a new What if beautiful objects of the highest quality are created with pride literally in your backyard. As a kind of evolution of the so-called Man- cave. No more garages workshops.

  What if the cycles of light, weather and student life define the use of certain big boxes. Long sun lit hours in the summer become spaces for recreation while the dark days and nights of the winter are land- scapes without humans into full production.

  What if the most beautiful chairs are produced here?
  What if living with the robot’s triggers creativity in unexpected ways? What if these processes are visible to kids while they play in the kindergarten?
  
  

  Possible couplings beyond the traditional mixed-use types: Kindergarten - pottery Greenhouse-experimental farming Greenhouse - market
  Greenhouse - biotech
  Swimming hall-river ecology study center
  river observatory-aeronautic research center
  small houses-artists residences-galleries and bakery faculty housing-university-start up incubators
  

• Jury remarks

  The project, Techno Monks, has both a formalistic structural and programmatic approach. The structural scheme is based on references to the typologies of the Santa Catalina Monastery in Peru (fine mesh-typology) and the Vitra Design Campus in Germany (big box-Campus-typology) and a belief in a dualistic win-win situation by combining a specific small-scale structure with a big one, both with different roles and programmes. “It is about empowering citizens so even small one-person companies can have access to high-tech equipment and facilities.”

  In addition to the two new structures the authors keep some of the ex- isting buildings. Together, this becomes a hybrid and complex scheme combining different scales and structures in different zones. Although the project is consistent and beautifully presented, the plan itself is not obviously direct operational. It is unclear if the scheme is meant as a framework of zoning with different guidelines or as a specific designed proposal. The project introduces a new university (big box function) as an initial step. This seems unrealistic and makes the plan vulnerable and less flexible. Small-scale arts and craft as the addition- al programme to the university and housing appear casually. The jury questions how the new proposed programmes are related to the existing context.

• Team

  Team members:

  Charlotte Hansson (SE), architect
  Christiana Pitsillidou (NO), architect
  Luis Callejas (CO), architect

  Contact information:

  www.lclaoffice.com
  lc@lclaoffice.com
  christiana.pitsillidou@gmail.com