Bracket 1 is titled “On Farming” and looks at capacity for architecture to address ideas and issues of productive landscapes and urbanisms. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labor, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harness the efficiency of collective and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. Farming is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes towards a privileging of production. The issue collects original design projects, installations, and essays, which interrogate new typologies, forms, and formats of the built environment. With almost 40design proposals and 12 essays, “On Farming” collects emerging designers and thinkers internationally.
Bracket is a new book series that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. It is a collaboration between InfraNet and Archinet. Seeking new voices and design talent, Bracket is structured around an open call for entries. Conceived as an almanac, the series looks at emerging thematic in our global age that are shaping the built environment in radically significant, yet often unexpected ways. The series will chart the emergence of this current design generation. A generation rose when the Internet was commonplace, when environmental issues reached critical “inconvenient truth”, and when the cultural capital of architecture was in need of new vision. The Bracket series will address the complex impacts of globalization on architecture, landscape, and urbanism.