Ecological Teardown

In Being Ecological, Timothy Morton proposes that being ecological is not a simply matter of exercising our free will as humans. The premise that there is a firewall which separates us from the rest of the world is an ontological impossibility. Foremost, being ecological is a process of learning to be attuned to the world. Similarly, Latour‘s ‘compositionist’ narrative identifies a world that presents ‘ever increasing intimacy with new natures.’ Intimacy requires acceptance and care and both are matters of designing how we choose to live with technology. The studio work presented here focuses on the design of homes that seek to attune energy production to domestic life through aesthetics. The studio is initiated through an examination of the photographic teardowns of Todd McLellan. The photographs include a variety of handheld domestic products that have been completely disassembled into two-dimensional archives of anthropomorphic, mechanical and digital components. Torn down, and emptied out, each object provides students with a chronicle for designing the future.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.107.2

Volume Editors
Amy Kulper, Grace La & Jeremy Ficca

ISBN
978-1-944214-21-0