Today we build cars without drivers, buildings without inhabitants, cities without roads. We try to make cities smart; turn every building into powers stations and have built after 9/11 more high-rise buildings than ever before. We do not either really know why we do that nor what we do when we design these entities. The Framework of the Thesis research programme is based on a simple question: How do our cities look like? How does reality design? The aim of The City in The Age of Hyper-Objects Thesis Studio is to develop an architectural project for the city, which is neither driven by a scientific approach of data scapes nor should it be guided by empirical case studies to understand their morphology.

Hyperobjects are to what Timothy Morten refers to: “things that are massively distributed, very large relative to humans, whether directly manufactured by humans or not”. They have a significant impact on us humans and that we struggle to understand them. We discover we are stuck to them and realize as more as we know about them as more they withdrawn from us.

Hyperopbejcts to Timothy Morten are the Biosphere, our Solar System, the Sum of Nuclear materials on the planet or the sum of the Machinery of our Capitalism. Hyperobjects are hyper to humans, but effect humans daily life and produce their own architecture like nuclear or solar Power-station in the desert, Pencil high-rise towers in New York, human less cities in China or sustainable building systems. Hyper buildings become the Author of our architecture. The aim of the research project is to design new forms of architecture for our contemporary city, in which objects of any kind, like machines, buildings, landscapes or artificial environments are design under the influence of hyper-objects and become fused or merged together to form new architectural types.

 

The City in The Age of Hyper-Objects is directed by Peter Trummer.