Energy Attack Unit
Diploma 18 embraces the realities of an era referred to by American economist Jeremy Rifkin as the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, an era defined by new forms of transportation, construction and energy. Over the year we have actively engaged with the realities of the environmental condition of architecture and have followed the macro trend of GGG (Global Green Growth), with a particular empathy towards science, people and nature.
Each of the thesis projects produced this year is defined by the exploration of energy technologies that engage with a series of current conflicts triggered by global warming. Speculative scenarios have grown out of the following queries:
How do we confront the death of biodiversity in the Mediterranean?
Can we contain a hurricane crossing the Caribbean?
How do we reconnect the natural environment and rivers back to the city of Taipei?
Can we reactivate the oasis of Bahrain and fill the aquifer beds?
How do we prevent the Antarctic ice habitat from melting?
Can we capture the methane emitted by the Mongolian landscape?
The theses position themselves between science and fiction, and create visionary scenarios that attempt to raise consciousness through a debate on the appropriate scale of intervention. This debate relates to physical and social phenomena, and expands to envelop countries, continents and oceans, while contemplating not just the immediate present but projecting forward to a distant future – decades from now.
Our solutions develop large-scale interventions as performative membrane structures that not only imply minimising mass, material and energy but also emit an ephemeral quality through their adaptability. Structured around a series of defining themes, the proposals ultimately present the ongoing mission of Diploma 18 to operate as a green architectural laboratory, with students acting as its activists.