Machine Landscape

Social media applications have digitalized our public discourse. The emergence of digital platforms has fundamentally altered the traditional means of communication and relationship building, which were once limited by face-to-face interactions. These “digital platforms” are designed to replicate the ancient Greek Agoras, physical spaces where citizens gathered to discuss, perform, and deliberate on cultural matters.

In the past, Agoras played a vital role in enabling individuals to come together and share information, discuss topics of interest, and collaborate on projects. However, in the digital age, social media has become the primary medium for public engagement and community building. This has been exasperated in recent years by the covid lockdown, where our only means of relating was through digital platforms. As we return to a new normal, we must contend with how can our public spaces - parks, gardens, plazas - would support and deepen those digitally-bound new relationships.

It is impossible to imagine a neo-Luddite approach to civic and cultural life where we engage without these modern tools in the digital age. Instead, architects and urban planners have started to design public spaces and augmenting them with digital technologies in mind. This approach seeks to combine the benefits of traditional Agoras with the convenience and ubiquity of digital platforms. For Project II, students will hypothesize public and physical spaces that house and support digital communities.

In the second exercise, students will work individually to produce a speculative master plan to physicalize our social media application. An initial site plan drawing will be provided to the students as a foundation. Students will use this initial site plan as a starting point to further document specific site conditions that are deemed crucial to the student’s speculative master plan.

While dissecting the site, we will look for opportunities to place the programs, circulation, media, and infrastructure extracted from E01’s annotated report. The student can derive the representation of drawings and models from the E01’s annotated report culture style, or they can develop a new one.