“We live in a time where everything or everyone can be upgraded or ‘pimped’. After the worldwide acceptance of plastic surgery, it was time to subject our worldly possessions (Pimp my Ride) and digital identities (Facebook) to an esthetical and/or functional upgrade. So it’s likely that eventually everything will be pimp-able. Even our own planet.”
The PIMP MY PLANET video, created the good people of Studio Smack, explores the possibilities of redesigning our planet according to ideals or aesthetic values. It is the wet dream of every modernist – I bet Mondriaan would have liked this – and then you wake up and realize that maakbaarheid is never finished and with every attempt to cultivate nature, a next nature arises that is wild and unpredictable as ever.
Farming, industrialisation and more recently tourism, mobility (goods and people), production and therefore globalization have turned our planet into an artificial environment. Built up in a way, under a partially unplanned and iterative process.
Maybe more recently has it become more planned, through globalisation: production of this item into this country (due to low costs of goods and/or human workforce, "good political conditions", good knowledge, etc.), transportation here, selling there. Headquarters in this "low taxes" country, etc.
The problem is that this "planning" (called zoning) approach has failed in cities and landscapes in the late 60ies, revealed itself depleting (due to poor flexibility, diversity and variations) and that there are no reasons why it won't fail in the exact same way at the global level (in fact, it already starts to fail).
This means: we have to start "planning" our planet and come up with fresh theories and "earth architectures" for that! This approach might have to take into account (in disorder, non-exhaustive) weather and seasons, social aspects, technologies, cities, landscapes, architecture, resources, energy, food and goods production, sustainability, tourism, consumption, politics and economy, mobility, sustainability, birth control, satellites, (protection of) fauna and flora, information & communication, networks, physics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, etc.
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
