Transcend

Studio Pierandrea Angius

Tutors Tina Tsagkaratou, Angel Tenorio

Team Karim Hallak, India Baz, Noa Guy, Behice Ozer, Yujie Wang

With the rapid augmentation of social complexities, distant opportunities and resources proliferate while the discipline of architecture seems to remain passive and stagnant. Transcend challenges this paradigm and proposes an architecture that is active, adaptive, and mobile and exists in contexts of constant dynamism. This paradigm shift is established by detaching the built environment from the ground, aiming for an independent, self-sufficient system of a soft infrastructure. Architecturally, this notion is materialised with the development of a hybrid system at the intersection of mobility and liveability.  

Starting from the unit, Transcend is an apparatus extending from the human body in the form of a macro-suit / micro-architecture, capable of reconfiguration through shapeshifting in response to various conditions. Such conditions include an optimised mode of living that addresses daily household patterns and needs by activating an adaptive and reactive minimal space in accordance with proxemics and ergonomics. In case of mobility, the unit transforms into an aerodynamic shape optimised for a hybrid mobility, suited for on-ground movement as well as gliding. The ability of transformation is enabled by the deployment of flexible structures and soft materials intrinsically connected in a network system of hierarchies forming the elements of the unit. 

On the level of the collective, units formulate migratory patterns that follow natural rhythms. In this scenario, an efficient mobility is driven through the harvest of energy offered by wind flows and solar radiations. As the system travels, it seeks environmentally optimal locations in which a durational settlement takes place. These settlements offer an expanded liveability through the clustering of different types of units, from which taxonomies of various spaces emerge, connected through an embedded circulatory system. What is ultimately achieved is an architecture of an ephemeral nature that parallels human presence.