Note - This information is for Academic Year 2009 - 2010.
For Academic Year 2010 - 2011 visit the new Architecture Site [ Download full Brief as PDF File ]  “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”- Buckminster Fuller
This year Atelier 6 will continue to work in line with the sustainable design research agenda set out by Ezio Manzini and his “Sustainable Everyday” design approach group. Sustainability here is intended as a systemic change to be promoted at the local and global scale. It will be achieved through wide-ranging social learning process, whichaims to re-orient the present, UNsustainable transformations towards a sustainable “knowledge society”. We hope to develop proposals and tools with which architecture can actively take part and this learning process. We will be looking at ways how the specific skill set architects and designers have can facilitate, promote, broadcast social innovation so as to make more effective and universally accessible. Beyond the bleak visions for our future painted by the Stockholm Networks Carbon Futures reports, and the inevitable consequences of the peak oil scenario there are still promising directions we can take: act globally local and promote collaborative networks, distributed systems and creative communities. The Atelier will also investigate and follow the ethos of “Transition Town” who promote elation and optimism rather than guilt and horror in the face of the challenges ahead of us. Within this context the aim of the work in the Atelier is to develop an architecturefor a new kind of ‘being -in -common” for local, globally connected communities in an urban environmnent. The main site for the year will be Hackney Wick in London. An exciting area at the fringes of the Olympic Park, earmarked for imminent regenaration with strong, longestablished artist community, most noatbly the “Hackney Wicked Group”. Students will be asked to join and engange with local environmental, political, entrepreneurial enterprise netwroks and groups to find ‘clients’, or better ‘partners’ or even co-designers to develop projects with for example in co-operation with Transition Town. Over the course of the year students will be guided to develop their own particular brief through a series of programmed workshops and design excercises. The series will culminate in a Headquarter for one of the chosen groups and the local community, resulting in a new architectural and urban typology. A further subtext to the year is the investigation of the possibility and necessity of an urban argriculture.Food is one of the main aspects of our lives in need of localisation. WIth this in mind we will start the year with a hands on design project: a Garden Shed prototype for Hasdpen Garden, an old walled kitchen garden in rural Sommerset. Already thereare real clients for this and the project will be organised as a competition with the winner (or a combination of several projects and
ideas) being built!
Programme Term 1 Researching one natural, one geomatrical and one organisational pattern in 2d and design possible 3d permutations. 
Researching one natural, one geomatrical and one organisational pattern in 2d and design possible 3d permutations. 
Join + go to meetings. Spatial diagram of operational activities and networks. Survey drawings shared within the Atelier. “Ecology diagrams” of the social, physical
and virtual forces discovered on envisaged for the site. Explorative collages and drawings. References Websites: www.sustainanble-everyday.net/manzini/
www.transitiontowns.org
www.capitalgrowth.org
www.sustainweb.org
www.hungrycitybook.co.uk
www.thepolytechnic.org
www.london21.org
Books:
Transition Handbook - from OIl Dependency to Local Resilience
Urban Act - a handbook for alternative prcatice, aaa/PEPRAV
Expanding Architecture , design as activism, eds Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford
Pattern language Towns Buildings Constrcution, Christopher Alexander, Sara
Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives - Carolyn Steel
Craddle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart Films: An inconvenient Truth - Al Gore
Money as debt by Paul Grignon
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