Automated Haven is a creative community for artists going through a phase of self-discovery, rethinking their life and art. It becomes a place to re-charge and re-inspire artists far away from the pressures of daily life. This retreat is a celebration to the banal and primitivity of being surrounded by nature in a techno- social context. The project is laid out with the juxtaposition of programs: Harvesting / Art making / Automated Leisure.
NY will be the testing territory for the project, starting with a pilgrimage of the Manhattan population to Upstate NY. The Artists community will be set up in the town of Coxsackie. The Hudson river will be the conduit to gather and distribute obsolete industrial devices such as water tanks, silos and e-waste.
The materials collected along the river will be reused and refurbished to fabricate a series of walking housing pods. Each pod will function as a home, an art studio and an automated harvester machine all together. A hybrid between a house and machinery. The cycle of production for self-sustaining will influence the landscape, creating natural roads defined by orchards of multiple fruits and vegetables.
Each walking pod will push the concept of automated leisure displaying domestic mechanisms that will create different living routines depending on its occupants. The walking pods will move freely, taking on the spirit of non-appropriation of land where houses do not belong to a specific site and the occupation of soil is dedicated for production.
The artists community will transform old buildings into social hubs where the transaction of goods and communal activities will flourish.
Since the topography is flat the whole site is flooded. Taking this as an opportunity, the landscape is intervened with elevated orchards made from the rubble of demolishing buildings.
Each cluster of walking pods will engage with an artistic activity related to fruit such as: Carving, Sculpturing, Painting, Modeling and alternative creations. Each pod will be anchored to a canopy structure that becomes a circulation space on the top and a pavilion for exhibiting art on the bottom.
The pavilions are important node structures placed in strategic points of the landscape where the walking pods can anchor temporarily. Being transitional docks allows for temporal residency and an intermittent process of displacement.
The final achievement will be the blend of new ways of living and co-existing starting by the reckoning of the current living dynamics. This project seeks to redefine the concept of housing through a cyborg architecture.