ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
ARCH 672 - PROPOSITIONS
FALL 2025Fantastic Beasts: a Probative Farm'ish/ Largescale Agriculture x a Circus'ish
The impetuses for the Fantastic Beasts studio were manifold: increasing the possibility of facilitating public engagement with large-scale, systemically driven logics (industrialized farming, agricultural production, for ex); exploring various forms of hybridization to augment typological thinking; scaling up the work of the architect to include landscape, spatiality, architecture and, objects/ devices instruments; making it challenging to work in more conventional terms, opening doors to think alternatively about the representation of, and production of, spatial realms.
We finished the term with the 8'ish week design of a farm’ish/ large scale agricultural production, crossed with a ‘circus’ish, located in an agricultural region in the Midwest. We worked on the production of large-scale agriculture, natural and synthetic, and other farm’ish ‘things’ towards alternative conceptualizations of the production of agriculture, linked to public interactions, while leveraging the spectacular, public oriented and temporally active attributes of a circus. We foregrounded: crossbreeding a farm’ish and circus’ish; we explored various kinds of hybrids (a John Deere harvester crossed with a mythological creature, for ex); chased surrealist principles, familiar strangeness, in particular; looked into possible references to varied mythologies, folklores and deep practices linked to agriculture, harvesting and performance; explored mixed technologies; we considered nocturnal, diurnal and seasonal conditions; and probed innovative programmatic thinking. The cohort was off center... a good thing. Mostly we shared, grew and had a lot of fun!