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	+ Intermediate Unit 8 - Politics of Fabrication
	09-10 Politics of Skin Grafting
	Following Bruno Latour’s reflections on contemporary socio-politics, this unit will examine the assertion that the social—as it relates to contemporary cities—can no longer be conceived as the cohesive force of the community. On the contrary, it must be conceived as a loose association of individual experiences scattered across different surfaces that shape urban practices. Thus, the architectural design challenge is no longer to address issues to constituencies and social groups, but to individuals and audiences in the city. In this context, architectural elements that establish direct and reciprocal relations between constructed forms and individuals, such as the building’s skins, play an important role in the socio-political activation of our cities. Indeed, it is through seemingly insignificant material practices, such as those developed in building’s skin fabrication, that political questioning can be found today. As a result, this unit aims to address political issues in combination with fabrication processes, while considering that urban and political issues are imbedded in the related material practices. The work within the unit will be framed by a specific, politically charged urban condition—namely, La Plaza de la Revolución in La Habana, Cuba, a place where city and national politics are particularly bounded to everyday experiences. This urban location embodies a richness of scales, social practices, and political conflict epitomized by the presence of the iconic Ministry of Internal Affairs. Constructed under Batista’s dictatorship, the Ministry building is an archetypical example of “colonial” modernism now turned into a national monument to Ernesto Che Guevara. As such, an extensive part of the unit’s work will take both the Plaza de la Revolución and the Ministry as the ideal platform for showcasing plural responses to democratization and political processes in Cuba.
	10-11 Challenging Political Expression in Little Havana
	Inter 8 continues exploring the politics of today from its most basic manifestations in the city, experimenting with new scenarios of political expression in intentionally polemical locations. In today’s cities, where tourists and natives, immigrants and citizens, temporary and life-long residents all live side by side, the traditional meaning of politics has changed. Consequently, political representation depends less on constituencies than it does on direct, voluntary and unbinding associations among people who assert their presence in the public arena. The unit posits the possibility of redefining the political expression of the multitude as the making visible of the relationship between everyday activities in public and the particular material constructions that ultimately give them political value. This year the unit will be working on the Versailles Restaurant in the Calle Ocho (SW 8 St.) of Little Havana, Miami. This has been the epicentre of political expression of Cuban exiles in the United States since 1971, and manifests within its walls the invisible barriers that lie between Cuba and the US. Students will analyse this building and the small public space in front, exploring their socio-cultural milieu in order to redefine them within a sophisticated understanding of politics today.
	+ Politics of Fabrication Laboratory
	Politics of Fabrications Laboratory (PFL) is a research-through-design initiative which explores the changing political implications of material experimentation when applied to the construction of urban public space. Supported by Inter Unit 8 in collaboration with the Digital Prototyping Lab at the Architectural Association (AA), PFL will initiate a series of speculative workshops which experiment with politically charged materials in actual city sites. PFL workshops will be structured in two 1-week segments. In the first part (tools and conceptual-scheme), students will learn new software to be used to construct innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday activities and particular material organizations. These experimental propositions are meant to define new models of interaction between the individual and the collective in the public arena. In the second part (fabrication-construction), students will work collaboratively on the implementation of one of the schemes that has been selected from the first week’s proposals. Fabricated on site, this temporary prototype will evaluate in real life the potential and achievements of the design. As part of an interest in the relationship between particular socio-cultural conditions and fabrication techniques, PFL workshops will be based on Latin-American contexts. The energetic everyday life in Latin-American cities has been paralleled by radical experimentations in fabrication developed since the early 1950s. From Felix Candela's double curvature concrete shells to Eladio Dieste's undulated brick surfaces Latin American architecture has demonstrated an outstanding vitality in material expression which still intrigues today’s architects. The capacity of these experimentations to change the relationship between architecture and the public, as an alternative to the standards of high modernism after World War II, will be used to open up creativity in current digital fabrication experiments.
	Valparaiso (1-12 August 2011)
	In 2011, the first of PLF Workshop will take place in Ciudad Abierta (Open City) in Valparaiso (Chile), where we will be experimenting with architectural structures in wood. The Ciudad Abierta is an inspiring initiative promoted by a group of artists, poets and architects who looked for an alternative way of living in a vast landscape of dunes facing the ocean. Led by architect Alberto Cruz and poet Godofredo Lommi, the city was founded in 1971 as an open site that included residences for artists and architects and the Architecture School of the Catholic University in Valparaiso. Students and residents have built their constructions in the city as a way of linking poetry and space ever since. Long crossings along the territory, poetic acts and collaborative gatherings have been the basis of each construction foundation in this magical city. Ciudad Abierta is still in continuous expansion and configures one of the most intriguing landscapes of experimental architecture in the world.
	University of Cambridge
	+ Studio 2 ( Nuria Alvarez Lombardero with Ingrid Schröder)
	Studio 2 will be designing a tower that will be located above a the new transport interchange at Tottenham Court Road in central London. We will start our analysis of the site with the first version of our building in place – we will be examining how the surrounding context might warp, erode, envelope, and corrupt the formal order of this initial instinctive move. This is a process of UN-DESIGN by which we will work in league with the surrounding neighbourhood and the larger urban metabolism to adapt the order and inhabited character of our buildings. We expect our initial schemes to shift radically over the course of this process, to densify, multiply or shrink.
	TEC MONTERREY - Campus Queretaro
	Summer 2010_ Condensadores Urbanos. La tendencia de la ciudad contemporánea en América tanto en el Norte como en el Sur sigue siendo la dispersión y la proliferación de entidades individuales en el territorio unidas por potentes infraestructuras. Consecuencia o reflejo de esta tendencia es una creciente individualización y atomización de la sociedad, y una pérdida exponencial de la experiencia de lo colectivo en la ciudad. Paradigmáticamente, esta experiencia queda cada vez más relegada a cascos históricos preservados para su explotación turística o a la segregación social de los clubes privados. De este modo, los territorios metropolitanos se expanden formando una alfombra de individuaciones donde los ciudadanos tienden a vidas cada vez más privadas y el espacio de lo público queda reducido al mínimo.