OneState

OneState is a state of total control. Every number is scheduled for every minute of every day, counted by the Table of Hours. Imagination is an illness. Freedom is an archaic, pre-civilized notion. There are no names, only numbers. Sexual relations are timetabled and divorced from emotion. Love for anything other than the collective is weakness. Happiness is surrender.

OneState’s power structures are based on notions of transparency, nonfreedom and the all-seeing eye of the ‘Benefactor’ and his ‘Guardians’. On the day of Record 13 the totally controlled city of OneState was submerged in fog. This brief condition of intense fog presents an opportunity for each number of OneState to understand themselves as their physical self without the pressures of convention, rather than as a minutiae surrendered to a collective machine. The freedom from convention is unnerving. The semiotics of total control have disappeared into the glaring intensity of early morning fog, even if only fleetingly. However, this ephemeral condition represents an empowering glimpse of freedom.

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“power is manifest throughout entire societal structures as micro-powers felt at the level of everyday life.”- Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality

“all space starts with words” - Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Piecesc

“creation and revolutionary struggle have the same objective: the realisation of life.” - Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys,


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About

Studio Six, MArch School of Architecture,

University of Sheffield

The work of  Studio Six is linked to the Interdependence Day project, (www.interdependenceday.co.uk)

launched in 2006 to reinvigorate sustainability debates and to question some of the technocratic outcomes of seeing ecological and economic concerns as an accounting or ‘problem solving’ challenge.

What can architecture contribute to this attempt to reconsider global, economic and environmental issues?

Interdependent understanding invites an architecture rooted in creativity and metaphor, which ‘listens’ to the potential of a city rather than imposing mark marketable criteria of enterprise, lifestyle or efficiency. This architecture is based on conversations between the city and its varied inhabitants, and in an awareness of its social, economic and ecological metabolism.

The interdependencies of a place may be understood as a particularly dynamic and complex constellation of social, economic and emotional relations, but the term also has ambitions for a sense of a place that is extroverted and unexpected. Interdependence includes a consciousness of links with the wider world integrating in a positive way the near and far, the local and the global, the human and the ecological.

The studio will instigate alternative modes of architectural collaboration, representation, and communication that are more open and amateur rather than specialised or expert. We will be exploring an architecture of ‘making-do’ and of ‘provisional construction’.

The studio has been exploring the ’steel cities’ of Nowa Huta and Sheffield but we have also been thinking about other cities, about state responsibility, about carnival, about pigeons…     Renata Tyszczuk

 

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