Ecological Empires

Ecological Empires was a Masters of Architecture design studio ran at RMIT School of Architecture + Urban Design in 2023. It was the second studio in the Speculative History series.

Speculative History is a set of techniques adapted from fiction writing for architecture and urban design. It uses historical research and projects it through an alternative timeline of development into an alternative present. This technique is commonly used in fiction, film, comics and video games. Etymologically and functionally, history is made up of narratives based on both facts and subjective accounts. A historical fiction masquerading as truth is politically dangerous, but one declaring itself as propositional fiction can be a useful tool for architects working at urban scale to consciously account for the technological and cultural assumptions being made.

The goal of speculative history is to produce an alternative present that is actively orientated to define ‘context’ in a way that has more to do with current problems (such as ecological health, reversing inequality, queering, etc.), and is less reliant on self-identification and the taste-based normalisation of social hierarchy contained in ‘heritage’.

Early in the studio students looked closely at and emulated avante-garde 1960s-80s Utopian visions of ‘worlding’, such as Constant Nieuwenhuys’ ‘New Babylon’, Archizoom’s ‘No-stop City’, John Hejduk’s ‘Masques’ and Aldo Rossi’s ‘Teatro del Mondo’.

In the second half of semester, students branched out individually to describe a system of large-scale site development that would inform the logic of the site: Newquay, site in Melbourne’s Docklands recently completed and owned by a single developer, MAB corporation. Students were asked to re-do the financial-maximising logic of the development precinct with an eco-maximising logic. For each student ‘eco’ meant something different – such as systems of agriculture, flood resilience, heat exchange, light pollution and recycling.

Student work shown by: