Steel off-cuts and a cast-off structure, photographed by a modified obsolete film camera, instamatic x15
Symbiosis,
Collectivism,
Environmental Justice
It sounds like science-fiction, all these cities grown from a mass of single-celled organisms floating around in a murky cyanosphere. Amongst all the joys and sorrows of a complex brain, we humans aren’t so different from our beginnings. We need walls for shelter, means of conveying energy, food and oxygen in and out of those walls, and strategies to collaborate beyond our walls.
Praxis
Resource-Fullness
Cyan Station is a field station for transforming human habitat. It was founded as a rebuttal to the pristine minimalism of ‘architecture’. The art that has come to be known as beautiful images that crop out all the externalities and messiness of life, ecology, waste, the undesirable. True architecture can make space for cast-offs and find treasure in the offcuts. Cyan Station cultivates a practice of ‘resource-fullness’ towards a more harmonious exchange of resources inside and outside of our walls.
Embodied Practice
This concept of resource-fullness extends to our bodies, making full use of mind and body by cultivating a practice of hands-on prototyping. In order to design well, one needs to build, to make, to learn material and physical properties through putting things together.
Values
Symbiosis
A concept borrowed from nature, in architecture it can be described as a benevolent parasitism, the act of making use of salvage, finding beauty and utility in waste, being curious about leftovers
Collectivism
Necessity calls for new building typologies and alternate development models that enable the sharing of land, buildings, objects. Collectivity makes smarter use of resources while also reducing isolation and promoting community resilience.
Environmental Justice
At an urban and regional level, the hazardous byproducts of growth and development disproportionately affect lower income & racialized communities. An architecture of environmental justice contributes to the development of healthy places by taking on challenging sites and collaborating with equity-seeking communities.