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The Seeds of Exactitude

Part 1 Project 2004
Friedrich Graf Vitzthum
Declan O'Leary
Chloe Loh
Oxford Brookes University Oxford | UK
We focus on the absurd consequences of measurement and efficiency, and the
landscapes thus generated. Our 'Seeds of exactitude' propose an accellerating
propagation of road networks that eventually conceal the lands surface below
ever more complex swirls of concrete highway loops, whose destinations become
irrelevant. Entire populations of floating laboratory technicians collect
abundant quantities of riverbed samples; their tidal existence becomes increasingly
precarious as they scrape away at the riverbed. Miniature robotic farmers
toil away on vast gardens of orchids only to collect a tiny amount of perfume; 'the fur of extinct life'.
Armies of cranes and agricultural machinery tend this farm, creating a mechanical ballet. In the floating restaurant, only the 'distillate of waste' from the seaweed farm is consumed.

Friedrich Graf Vitzthum
Declan O'Leary
Chloe Loh


Our brief for an 'accidental farm' was intended to provoke questions about
process, by considering the production of the architectural project as a
collective rather than an individual activity ('farming'). It also suggests a
collective programme for landscape. Fred and Declan made a 'manifesto-project' to
articulate their vision of the utopic (and dystopic) accidental farm.

In their project, Declan and Fred explored issues of cultivation and
production within the ambiguous paradigm of progress that is 'urban development'. The
'seeds' of production and consumption' they cultivate contain the 'seeds of
waste and destruction' that will inevitably be their downfall. Natural farming
processes are conflated with artificial abstractions such as efficiency,
mechanisation and measurement with preposterous results.

Tutor(s)

2004
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