Academy of Fine Arts - IKA, construction material technology, Vienna AT
Fall 2015
Michelle Howard
Luciano Parodi

Working environments which require us to remain within a reduced spatial terrain and to assume the same position day in and day out. While being efficient at the level of square meterage per workspace, static workspaces are not efficient at enhancing intellectual and creative performance. Creativity unleashed while in movement, however, has been successfully practiced over the centuries: schools of thought like the peripatetic school of philosophy founded in Athens at around 335BC, practiced thinking while walking around the Acropolis.
The studio brief asked for an alternative workspaces that questions the current notion of stasis, and investigated different modes of production and the resulting flexible environments thereof.
“My body, it’s the opposite of an utopia: that which is never under different skies. It is the absolute space, the little fragment of space where I am, literally, embodied. My body, pitiless place” Michel Foucault - Utopian Body
The ‘cubicles digest’ is a new form of spatial activation and occupation in order to change the surrounding environment. It is a tool which represents movement and the possibility to define surrounding areas and usages by its own appearance and ability to transform. The central cube represents the organized concept of a working place that is surrounded by a constantly changing through inflating and deflating and interacting skin. The pushing and pulling of the cubicle forms a symbiosis of the human and the object that appropriates its surrounding as a workspace.