Teaching / MSc Advanced Sustainable Design
john.brennan@ed.ac.uk
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The masterplan drawing is almost a default in architecture in the creation of new settlements. However what it shows is often limited by the conventions of both academic and professional practice. MSc Advanced Sustainable Design welcomes students from a range of professional backgrounds and offers an opportunity to apply creative practice in the built environment. We use tools and techniques to understand settlements in the way they create and consume resource. We set a challenge of creating a new settlement of 500 homes in places with good levels of public transport provision. We don’t ask for masterplans but instead to represent the development purely as infrastructural flows of food, energy and water.
Fundamental to this is envisioning how a community is structured, its degree of self sufficiency and the implications in respect of choice, freedom and commitment. In the case of food, the balance of grown and purchased product and its potential for commerce provide many different scenarios for a low carbon future. In contrast to the functionality of recording infrastructure flow we also ask for utopian images of the worlds of work and leisure in the settlement. Utopian visions bring with them fully realised but profoundly fictitious worlds but reflect our ambitions to transform our neighbourhoods and settlements.
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1
Comla Settlement
Madison Sacramone, Grace Cowan, Maria Greenwald
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Borders new settlement utopian image.
Konstantinos Dimopoulos, Elina Polychronidou, Ernesto Carvajal
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Settlement cyclical infrastructures.
Alexandra Gray, Shen Qian, Diana Rivera, David Brownstein
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Water infrastructures East Lothian.
Marta Santoro, Mehal Chopra, Panita Varaiat, Tomas Gallindo
5
Arcadia: Infrastructure to Utopia.
Priscila Alanis, Weiqing Li, Nur Nadzeri, Paul Treichl