Platformed: Education and the Futures of Working Landscapes
A.M. Hauff (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
V. Muñoz Sanz – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
This project started with a simple question – what landscapes support the ‘city’? Hinterlands do not lie idle – often they are working landscapes, often they work to feed the city.
Agro – industrial systems are one of the most rapidly expanding spatial developments (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Yet their social and environmental implications largely remain invisible as these systems function as black boxes. This problem becomes more salient when considering landscapes which have been prestressed by exclusionary colonial legacies regarding land, mobility and knowledge.
This project uses the dairy farming landscape of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa as lens through which to examine the relationship between agricultural production, knowledge, people and other forms of life. This landscape was shaped by colonial and apartheid era policies of exclusion - creating a dual agricultural territory, which is being further stressed by climate and technological change. The indigenous Nguni cattle and the optimised foreign Holstein cattle embody this dual landscape – each represents two different systems of agriculture present on the same soil. The tension between these two systems drives both the research and design of this project.
The project subverts the colonial era short line railway by conceptualizing the rail corridor as a spine and platform which connects the gap between mobility, knowledge and working landscapes as a piece of public infrastructure for regeneration as opposed to extraction. The architectural response of this project is the design of a generic rail platform typology with a context specific technical college attached to it - embedded in the productive landscape that many people were previously excluded from. Rather than being an insular institution, the college is conceived of as a series of interweaving platforms, which mediate different learning environments and link students, farmers and the public to each other and the wider territory. These platforms are centered around three interacting sets of relationships: knowledge and production; analogue and digital; non-human, human and post human actors
These sets of relationships also inform the physical construction logic of the building as each end of the Nguni - Holstein spectrum has an associated set of materials, construction and climate logic. The technical detail of the building structure itself embodies this heterogeneous landscape.
Ultimately, the project takes seriously Schumacher’s provocation and that agriculture lies in the tension between the “incompatibilities of opposites, each of which is needed” (Schumacher, 1973; 89). Thus, the technical college is as heterogeneous as the landscape it inhabits – within the tension, students do not inherent a top-down single system, but instead they inhabit, maintain and re-imagine the futures of working landscapes.