Yavor Nedelchev
"Ex Machina": Integrating higher education into the industrial detritus of the “Hinterlands”. An investigation into heterotopic resistance.
About
“Ex Machina” pursues to anchor itself in a broader body of cultural work. The thesis asks questions about the complicated transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism, as well as the ability of capitalist industries to convert to different forms of economic models. The thesis interrogates a perception of the university institution that seeks to denounce commodity capitalism along with all its perceptible flaws, which have been exceedingly detrimental to society.
The project is essentially a form of resistance to the authority of the capitalist matrix, more precisely its growing control over the higher education system. It puts forward a representation of the university, which forms a close relationship with the residue of industrial capitalism, that is its machinal detritus.
This rapport, which is concurrently unconventional and contradicting, enables the formulation of a heterotopia, a condition that carries the ability to cause disturbance in any political or economic structure. This disruption re-introduces a university system that restores its principal ambition to deliver knowledge to society, stripped away from all the imperfections and confusions of capitalism.
Close-up Detailed Axonometric
“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built product of modernization is not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.” - Rem Koolhaas
Exploded Structural Section
The thesis will explore a method of opposing the seemingly inescapable university system by proposing an unusual institution through forging a Foucauldian heterotopia into an old industrial site.
Exploded Axonometric of repurposed casting house
The seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition will enable the construction of an autonomous university, which will allow higher education to move away from the hegemony of the capitalist machine of the city and revert to its main purpose of providing uncommodified knowledge to the global populace.