färm

färm

— a call for design that is humane, just, and sustainable

Fall 2020

…”While the action of individuals is important, it is action at the scale of infrastructures, designed with a mythology connecting individuals to ecosystems, that can catalyze a global shift”. ― Julia Watson, Lo-Tek

“We are all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks…are [places] where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved….the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory.” ― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

[Note: the ideas in this essay build on the work of White et al. in “Coupling” and “On Farming”, as well as others. See References at the bottom of this page]

färming

Our world today faces immense challenges: climate change, social inequity, and economic uncertainty are all in need of an agenda for corrective action. We need a method for achieving resilient, reliant, and robust sustainable design. I can think of no better prototype to achieve these goals than the idea of a farm. As we typically think of it, a farm is a place that harnesses the power of collective action based on living things: using plants, animals, and people together in an act of creative production. Usually, the aim is to produce healthy, nutritious, enjoyable food. But why not use this idea to produce everything else?

I propose we adopt this concept of a farm and apply it to spatial design - architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, interior design, and all their permutations. We can call this adopted strategy a färm — a framework for agency in architecture, research, and making.

Spatial design on a färm would treat architecture as we treat agricultural land, an intentionally-crafted superorganism that embraces the goal of collective interdependencies and productivity. Our built environment could be like an orchestrated ecosystem, intervening in (and metabolizing) economics, data, politics, and human spatial activities. It would do this with the goal of making these systems function in a better way, opportunistically re-structuring the world around it.

To accomplish this, a färm would need to be composed of a dynamic infrastructure, a set of devices that could be deployed ‘softly’ — they would need to be adaptable (link) and ambivalent to scale. We can use a familiar farm product - an egg - to illustrate a set of tools for this goal:

This ‘egg’ diagram expands on the ideas of traditional infrastructure using a set of hybrid spatial devices: surfaces, containers and conduits:

• Programmed / Productive Surfaces are planes of mediation, thickened and intelligent. They could be parks, gardens, roofs, floors, or public plazas.

• Programmed Containers are defined by enclosure, density, and often verticality. They perform as nodes or destinations within a network and are composed of layers of programmed/productive surfaces. In their most defined sense, we know them as buildings, but as their level of enclosure loosens they can become spaces in urban/natural landscapes as well.

• Conduits are carriers of matter and energy, circulating and exchanging within a larger network. Characterized by movement, they are streets, pathways, rivers, electrical wires and other linear elements.

These devices support occupants, energies, flows, resources, and matter, yielding emergent/multi-valent public realms; in short, all of the components of spatial design. They enjoy an ignorance of typical professional divisions (engineering + architecture + agriculture), creating hybrid conditions that unleash Goldschmidt’s ‘hopeful monster’ - large scale mutations in response to changing conditions.

Using these spatial/infrastructural tools, färming can define spatial design by its productive relationships to the living world around it. It encourages an interconnected, systems-based thinking model that will allow architects and other designers to positively contribute to both the man-made and natural ecologies around us in a way that benefits the whole world. Net-positive energy, net-negative carbon, circularity of building materials, and human-centric spaces/places are just the beginning of what can be achieved on a färm.

references + inspiration

Mason White, “Formatting Contingency”, in COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office, Pamphlet Architecture #30, Princeton Architectural Press, 2010 (link)

Mason White et al, “Farming”, in [Bracket] Almanac 1 - On Farming by InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office, Actar, 2010.

Dodington, E. M. (2013). How to design with the animal: Lessons in cross-species architecture and design. Houston, Texas.

Bruce Mau, “Designing LIVE: A new medium for the senses”, in The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, Chronicle Books, 2018 (pdf).

LinYee Yuan, Johnny Drain, “Mold” - Issue 03: Food Waste, Tallinn Book Printers, 2018.