Excrescent Utopia is a conceptual and parasitic dwelling conceived from the necessity to provide a new generation of homeless citizens with space and facilities of their own, whilst strikingly raising awareness and giving back to them an identity within our society.
Excrescent Utopia is about architecture growing abnormally out of something else. It's a fabricated structure that has grown from an existing constituent. The utopia part means that the concept tries to imagine changing the street environment - creating a better environment. Conceptually, the project is something that hopes to make our world better when utilised.
Excrescent Utopia is a piece of parasitic architecture - a tensile dwelling that was conceived from the idea of integrating the homeless back into society and giving them an identity again.
It's a flexible concept - users find a location, a street light of their choice, and construct the dwelling around it. They use the street light as the structure's fundamental centre for support. From this, they can then hack into the light itself, and into the grid, to gain access to electricity. The user can then use this to power utilities.
The dwelling is constructed from a light tensile membrane - poly-laminated nylon or Gore-Tex - which allows for mobility and travel within the city. This makes it easy to put up and take down. The architectural language of the Excrescent Utopia is borrowed from the practical and technological constituents of sail ships - the pulleys, sails and rope lines - so exudes a sense of transparency, weightlessness, and movement. It's a nice contrast to the surrounding structures, which are usually opaque, grounded and static. This has an obvious impact on the immediate area, raising awareness of a prominent homeless network, while presenting them with an identity in this anonymous, metropolitan society.
The spaces inside allow for sitting, standing and laying down. Within these, users can utilise the space depending on the activity and the level of privacy they want. For example, if they're eating, they have a space to sit and eat. If they would like to busk, they have a space to stand and be more apparent to people in the surrounding environment. Likewise, if they're tired, they have a space to sleep and be more private.
Excrescent Utopia was a project initially set ten years from now - a time when, because of the ongoing changes to the UK's benefit system and its affect on younger people in the future, a new generation of homeless would be more abundant.
This new generation of young homeless people will be more technologically savvy and, overall, their dependency on technology will be much greater. The parasitic form of this concept, and its capability to hack into a source of energy, tries to address this. In this way, the concept attempts to identify with this younger homeless society by providing them with the functionality of utilities this generation are used to. However, having initially set Excrescent Utopia ten years from now, I believe the current economic climate in Britain today could even suggest a more contemporary setting.
Text: Milo Ayden De Luca.
