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Wednesday, November 10, 2010
In case you need reminding, you now only have exactly one month to submit to Bracket 2.
Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.
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Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design.
And in case you've yet to begin work on your submission and need a starting point, check out these videos of landslides and the infrastructural counter-measures to mitigate and manage an ever shifting landscape.
A mountain ex-urb of catching dams, deflection walls, earth sewers and mesh-bracketed hillside roads. Single-family deflection-dam houses with self-raking zen rock gardens, a fog of pulverized boulders billowing from the occasional rockslide giving the place a touch of the arcadian. Debris basins as community parks braceleted through a creeping city.
When the mountains have been denuded of vegetation and the torrents are on their way, everyone will go about their daily business as usual, sleep peacefully while boulders and mud flow around them. Should their homes topple when the ground beneath gives way, remember that they were designed in the same way that the International Space Station was designed for astronauts floating in a gravity-free environment, or Fred Astaire.
