Agent of Change

Geoff Shearcroft, of The Agents of Change, will be coming round tomorrow at 11:30am to speak at the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Pop Up branch here in London.
I first found Shearcroft’s work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through a book called Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, Shearcroft’s image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back – as if grafted there, or perhaps cloned – was a tongue in cheek 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].

The Agents of Change themselves have a huge array of noteworthy projects – including Monsanto New Garden City, in which it was asked: what would happen if global agri-business giant Monsanto were to purchase the London borough of Hackney…? What if they then turned 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.”
There’s also a 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].

Meanwhile, the AOC’s recent proposal for the Birnbeck Island competition is also fantastic, involving a very colorful village and a sort of artificially amplified mountain form on a pier in the west of England.
It’s geology meets housing, offshore.

[Images: From the Birnbeck Island and Birnbeck Village proposals by The Agents of Change].

More germane to this year’s London Festival of Architecture, The Agents of Change also designed The Lift, a temporary pavilion which they describe as “a new Parliament.”

[Image: The Lift by The Agents of Change].

In any case, I could go on and on, uploading images of their work all day.
Shearcroft will be speaking at the Pop Up Storefront tomorrow at 11:30am – so come by to hear what he has to say.