David Greene's 'Suitaloon', 1967

LECTURE PROGRAMME

Day 1 (Jan. 4) Alessandra Ponte, Utopia out of Garbage:
The Architecture of the Counter-Culture in the American South-West.

Day 2 (Jan. 5)
Tim Street- Porter, A hundred favourite photos

Day 3 (Jan. 6)
Alvaro Zuñiga, Atacama's coastal geography

Day 4 (Jan. 7)
Arturo Lyon, Tensile and pneumatic


Day 5 (Jan. 8)
Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Ephemeral and nomadic

Day 8 (Jan. 11)
Catherine Ingraham, Return to Nature: architecture and biomodernity

Day 9 (Jan. 12)
Enrique Walker and Thomas Weaver in conversation

Day 10 (Jan. 13)
Final Jury

HOLIDAY

In January 2012 the AA/MARQ Visiting School at PUC will return to the extreme climatic and geographical conditions of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. But after the rigours of two previous years, this time we have decided to go there on Holiday, and engage in a design project based upon the tourism industry. This holiday demands that both participants and tutors become tourists, using the photographic camera – or as Alessandra Ponte has defined it, tourism’s ‘quintessential weapon’ – as our principal design tool. Armed with our Canons, Nikons and Leicas, we will exploit Chile’s uniquely attenuated land mass in exploring the Atacama’s liminal zones – specifically those areas where the desert meets the Pacific ocean. Hosting the workshop beside the seaside – in addition to Chile’s capital, Santiago – the programme will address the processes of leisure and human occupation along the desert edge. We will understand tourism as a foundational and unstoppable force that has created many human enclaves in extreme territories, thereby opening up a relationship between "difficult" or "problematic" territories and leisure. Around these premises we will work upon minimal programs for desert coastal occupation by revisiting the study and design of tents and nomadic shelters as seasonal collective dwellings for the desert. Having in mind Archizoom, Ant Farm, Archigram and Superstudio as fundamental references, the spirit of the design brief will be located within the 1960s: membrane enclosures that symbolise so much more than sheltering. Departing from there we will advance design investigations on tensile, textile and pneumatic structures by introducing new technological, cultural and climatic considerations. The photo/diagram/drawing of the membrane will be thus tied into ideas about landscape, environment and tourism. Within the physical and historical context of Atacama the workshop will combine design and theoretical enquiry while investigating a panoply of architectural, technical, art historical, and cinematic images, all helping us to imagine scenarios for the possible futures of the Atacama desert coast.