“…Aside from holding down the fort for Geoffs everywhere, Shearcroft and I were actually guests on the same radio show a few years ago, but this will be the first time we’ve met in person. I first found Shearcroft’s work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through the book Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, the image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back, as if grafted there or even cloned, was a glimpse of what Shearcroft called, in a 2001 paper for the Royal College of Art, “the new biology of architecture.”
Image: “Grow Your Own” by Geoff Shearcroft
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The Agents of Change themselves have a huge array of noteworthy projects – including the awesome Monsanto New Garden City, in which it’s asked: what would happen if global agri-business giant Monsanto were to purchase the London borough of Hackney, turning it into an Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)?
“Costly infrastructural components are replaced with a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems,” the architects suggest. The economically depressed borough would present “new growing opportunities,” thus “liberating the ground’s agricultural potential.”
Then there’s the project known as Roof Divercity in which all the roofs of Croydon are activated as new social, economic, and agricultural spaces for the borough’s residents.
Images: Roof Divercity by The Agents of Change
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The AOC’s proposal for the recent Birnbeck Island competition is also fantastic, involving a very colorful village and a kind of artificially amplified mountain form on a pier in the west of England.
Images: From the Birnbeck Island and Birnbeck Village proposals by The Agents of Change
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Meanwhile, more germane for this year’s London Festival of Architecture, The Agents of Change also designed The Lift, which they describe as “a new Parliament.”
Image: The Lift by The Agents of Change
BLDGBLOG :Agent of Change
