CHRIS WOEBKEN

  WORKS    TEACHING    ABOUT

Mark
Intentional Estates Agency, 2019
Size 8.5"x11", unfolds, Edition 100
Billboard size sticker 
In collaboration with Tei Carpenter, David Knowles, Jesse LeCavalier, Julia Pyszkowski, Dan Taeyoung


The Intentional Estates Agency [IEA] adopts and modifies the mechanisms of desire and commodity logic of a real estate agency to engage issues of degrowth. It offers a brochure of sixteen portfolios of degrowth options that draw from a catalog of historical, contemporary and speculative intentional communities and social experiments from around the world. Rather than an emphasis on cost, location or square footage, these portfolios foreground, for example, communal metrics, platforms for collective sharing, and resource management.

Designed as an interactive questionnaire, the brochure prompts participants to discover a portfolio that might be suitable for them as a means to consider new forms of value outside of current habits, behaviors and the status quo. Participants navigate through a series of questions that pose value-based dilemmas towards four areas of concern (Environment, Labor, Mobility and Technology). Once in a matrix for an area of concern, participants are guided through another set of value-based questions towards a unique portfolio which houses exemplary (or counter-exemplary) degrowth case study options. The IEA supports the need to locate alternative pathways out of a paradigm of limitless growth and expand an empirical understanding of how design can support new forms of society and value systems.
Project Team: Tei Carpenter, David Knowles, Jesse LeCavalier, Julia Pyszkowski, Dan Taeyoung

The Intentional Estates Agency was presented at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale, “Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth.”

The project is generously supported by Dean Amale Andraos and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

Available for purchase at Printed Matter