OFF-GRID

This studio initiated a critical inquiry into the balance between the collective and the individual in the responsible production of space. Next to the question of public engagement with the more environmentally-conscious planning of cities and territories, we would like to understand how to make the new ethos truly personal.

The notion of the grid which usually refers to traditional utility systems that a city provides for its citizens as well as to a classical urban planning device will become a starting point for the studio. In our case it will also serve as a metaphor for all those well-established, often rigid structures of the past – physical but also intangible – that can be updated, rethought or abandoned altogether in response to major planetary issues. Going off-grid therefore would mean to develop concepts with alternative logic, to propose solutions that imply disconnection from centrally-governed matrixes.

The Off-Grid studio focused on the tendency to create all kinds of autonomous circuits which are independent, for instance, from centralised energy sources or from established information nets. What kind of alternatives to state-owned or large-scale commercial infrastructure could be developed as a critique of the status quo? Which communities and why are being formed off-grid? What role could design play in creating spaces for alternative living?

In times of ultimate co-dependency and digital connectedness, we studied a range of opportunities for self-reliant experimentation and productive solo action. Revisions of classical texts on constructive dissociation — Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and How To Live Together? by Roland Barthes, among others, — formed the basis of the studio seminar.
Discussion of famous artistic escapees Absalon, Lucy MacRae, and Joep van Lieshout, as well as of recent experiments in ecological urbanism and rogue landscape practices, helped the participants to formulate their very personal rationale for an off-grid prototype.