“I remember the future. It died a generation ago.” Jonathan Meades, 1997
Neoliberalism’s destruction of solidarity and security (the erosion of the Welfare State) has brought about a compensatory hungering for the familiar. An antidote to a period of change and acceleration in other aspects of life. While everyday life feels as though it has sped up, culture has seemingly slowed down.
Architecture and Urbanism, more than any other artistic discipline, cling to a nostalgic form of futurism. Formally, technologically and sociologically, it has a stunted relationship to the full spectrum of contemporary culture.
This research thesis proposes the use of the European Union, and it’s political, cultural,and economic sub-strata, not for the administration of Neoliberalism’s debt-value/value- capital disconnection, but to use the (super)state as a cultural apparatus, not to question the premise of the Union, but the methodologies through which it achieves it’s aims.
Longevity
A University for the Fourth Age
Longevity is a speculative project that discusses the conflation between market capitalism, advances in medical technology, and our struggles for 'newness' in architectural parlance, set in a near future where developments in gene screening, made ubiquitous by technology companies, have produced significantly increased lifespans - doubling to an average 140.
Data Centre - The Westway, London.
Nuclear Playground is a critical design project discussing our ambivalence and inability to reconcile potential climatic changes and potential futures with our experience of our ‘current’ world.
By 2050 global energy consumption is set to double. Given our predisposition to mitigating the effects of climate change through reductions in Carbon Dioxide emissions, it is likely that this will only be met by an enormous increase in the use of nuclear power.
Smith & Beech Mole were commissioned by Finnish shoe designer Finsk to deliver an exhibition design for their 10 year anniversary during London Fashion Week. The show is to be held at the Residence of the Ambassador of Finland, a Queen Anne Mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens. The design comprises two parts, a series of faux-found-objects referencing the residence interior designed by James Gibbs (1682-1754) that have undergone digital distortion to become static display plinths for the pieces.
The Clandestine Icon
The deep materiality of the digital crytallises particular social forms and values. The notion of computationality as ontotheology indicates the prevailing doxa of a digitally material world. Images and things seem to approach a New Aesthetic of the future; we’ve become frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. These visual artifacts
