The Embodied Restoration Lab is a design initiative by architect Afaina de Jong that works with ethically sourced data to resignify value to undervalued knowledge, and redefine underlying values and standards for application in/for the regenerative design in the field of architecture.
In the age of planetary crisis designers have to reframe how we relate to the planet and move beyond the limitations of extractive paradigms. But are we even capable of imagining new worlds, planetary or restorative architecture in a time of overwhelming planetary anxiety? Or are we adapting and building upon the limits of what we know already?
Difficulties of reproduction and embedded ways of thinking and doing, block the social and ecological restoration in architecture and the building of algorithms, institutions, values systems, laws, and material movements that do the necessary altering.
Not only the contemporary entanglement of human imagination with the technological is striking, but mostly that the AI generative outcomes are never far from what already exist, because the data and values inherent are dictated by what has been dominant in the online human archive. How and what we can imagine as humans, as designers and also as architects and designers is unmistakably tied to the technologies that we use and its inherent values and standardizations. With AI entering the architectural design field, design options are generated in terms of form, layout, materials, manufacturing methods, cost, etc. But the entered parameters, are still embedded on the standardisation and values embedded in modernity, modern architecture, colonialism, and business as usual.
The Embodied Restoration Lab collaborates with an architectural community of thinkers and designers in order to expand the thinking around the value and classification of architectures of planetary wellbeing. Its goal is to explore methods, practices and imaginaries at the intersection of architectural and ecological restoration through the practice of regenerative design.
Afaina de Jong (1977) is a Dutch architect based in Amsterdam. Her studio AFARAI (2005) has worked for renowned institutions as the Rijksmuseum, the Venice Biennale, the Gogh Museum and the United Nations. De Jong works on the boundary of architecture and art. Her work is deeply connected to represent people and cultural movements that are not traditionally represented in spatial form. De Jong situates her work in the public realm as part of the collective imaginary. Her discourse is international and intersectional, connecting art and counterculture with space. De Jong is the head of the Contextual Design MA department at Design Academy Eindhoven.
