A Distributed Ground: The Unknown Fields Division

• Published in: Architectural Design
• Main Authors: Young, Liam, Davies, Kate
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2013
• Subjects: Arctic; Northwest Passage; Northwest passage
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ad.1617; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2Fad.1617; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ad.1617

Abstract As leaders of the Unknown Fields Division at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, Liam Young and Kate Davies take their students on trips to the end of the earth. Cataloguing extreme territories, they investigate the role of design in developing new cultural relationships. Fictional speculation is used as an instrument for understanding emerging environmental and technological futures, in a process of experiencing, chronicling and, ultimately, reimagining the urban and the remote, and charting global flows and trajectories. Here they describe a speculative supply chain that begins below the surface of the Western Desert in outback Australia, and continues to the Arctic ‘Northwest Passage’ and on to London.