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The Ritual Cemetery of Brave New Turin
Brave New World
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The Fiat Lingotto factory has had a great impact on the identity and cultural heritage of Turin, and so, for the first project, I looked into the ideas behind the efficiency of car manufacturing and the Fordism model of economy. Using Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, as a medium through which to explore Fordism, I extracted a sequence of actions from the novel and applied these to an object using Grasshopper. The definition was refined so that the 3D model generated would show a trace of the previous actions acted upon it.
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Key ideas:
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Use of algorithmic functions to carry out a sequence of events that can be repeated and the order manipulated.
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A final product which exhibits process, trace and memory.
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Brave New World as an extremity and criticism of Fordism.
The Cemetery
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Visiting Turin, the Monumental Cemetery stood out as a place that depicted time and memory through its stylistically differing monuments. Historically, cemeteries have been built around socio-political relationships and so my building project will be a new interpretation and typology of cemeteries based on the current cultural identity of Turin.
The 4th Generation, or Ritual Cemetery will consider the identity of Turin today and, in a wider context, on the technological development of the 21st century. Historically, Turin has been a city with a high population of immigrants. Where, during the FIAT era, these were mostly southern Italians, now it is a multi-cultural demographic that Turin boasts.
The aim of this type of cemetery will be to create an awareness of social identity and an appreciation and acceptance of coexisting cultures. This will be done by reinvigorating and redefining traditional funerary customs to solidify cultural identity, whilst blurring physical and spatial boundaries between the grave sites to create a distribution system that is more organic and culture based.
The processes that occur in the new proposed cemetery will be informed by research into cultural rituals and beliefs on death. The traditions will be translated into an algorithmic set of rules that will then dictate the movements and transformations of a Funeral Marker which will become a growing, ever-evolving sculptural landscape, whilst still maintaining trace and identity.
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Key ideas:
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Challenging the typology of cemeteries.
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A mechanised, cultural-based system that recognises the role of Fordism and Futurism in Turin’s past.
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Incorporation of site-specific constraints/ details (e.g. herons that colonise the island)
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Introducing a new distribution system based on a culturally informed algorithm; not grid-based.
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