Introduction

2:00 – 2:30 PM

Getting to know each other and the scope of the seminar

_____

Discourse

2:30 – 4:00 PM

Non-Extractive Architecture. On Designing without Depletion. (Sternberg Press 2021)

Research project and book presentation with Sofia Pia Belenky, Space Caviar

As the true urgency of the environmental crises we face becomes clear, architecture requires fundamental reinvention. The assumption that the building industry can only fulfill humanity’s needs with the irreversible exploitation of the environment, of people, and of the future needs to be reconsidered. Through a series of essays by architects, geographers, historians, economists, urbanists, and philosophers, Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion explores whether an alternative paradigm in design is possible, and what values it might be founded on.

Could architecture be understood as the practice of guardianship of the environment, both physical and social, rather than an agent of depletion? Could the role of the architect deal less with form and more with integration, circularity, reuse, material research, and community building? Could supply chains be made shorter, and could buildings be more closely tied to the economies in which they exist? What are the models and metrics that such a paradigm could adopt?

Sofia Pia Belenky is an architect from New York, USA based in Milan, Italy. She completed her BFA at Bard College in 2011 and continued her studies at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, Architectural Association and Strelka Institute. Her work with Space Caviar uses built work, event and exhibition design, research, writing, and film as forms of an extended mode of architectural practice.

_____

Method

4:30 – 6:00 PM

Geological Filmmaking

Screening & practice discussion with Sasha Litvintseva

In recent years, media studies has developed theoretical models which consider the material aspects of media technologies. In the context of the widespread ecological crisis, such studies have included analyses of media as products of the extraction of geological materials. ‘Geological filmmaking’ contributes to this growing set of discourses by experimenting with the reciprocal relations between geology and film. ‘The geological’ here acts as a perceptual and cognitive extremity of the human (in)ability to grasp processes unfolding across vast spatio-temporal scales. Building on existing theoretical studies of the geological materiality of the filmic medium, the project takes two specific geological phenomena – asbestos and sinkholes –  to explore formal and temporal intersections between film and geology in order to engage with some of the representational challenges posed by the ecological crisis. The key claims of the project are the entangled and reciprocal co-emergence of the socio-economic and the geologic and of our mortal bodies and environments, and that film is able to provide a perceptual framework in which to contemplate these inextricable connections all the way down every scale: from the molecular to the planetary, from the immediate to the stretches of deep time.

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist filmmaker and writer researcher, whose work is situated on the uncertain thresholds of the perceptible and the communicable, organism and environment, and entropy and quantification, at the intersection of media, ecology and the history of science. Sasha is a lecturer in Film Theory and Practice at Queen Mary University of London and holds a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths. ​