"I T I S N O W T O H O T"
Bathed in the light of a volatile sun, Robert Kerans and a group of explorers venture southward, through ephemeral zones of geologic time-zones of transitory epochs. The unrelenting Triassic landscape reestablished in the blistering golden canopy has burned through the layers separating the inner and outer worlds of mind. In the ruins of the old world, the explorers re-emerge into primal realities and super-realities of their genetic subconscious.
P H E N O T Y P I C A L M E M B R A N E S is an exploration of speculative fiction as a basis for design. In The Drowned World, author J.G. Ballard creates for us a stark future in which the world's climate and, by extension, its geography, flora, fauna, humans and so on, have been dramatically altered in the wake of an unstable sun. The Drowned World follows the story of Robert Kerans, a scientist born in Camp Byrd - the new polar country established after all major cities became unfit for human habitation - as he ventures southwards towards the Triassic landscape of what was once the equator. In our studio, Climate SF, our task was to design an architectural response to and within this work of fiction, using The Drowned World as our design milieu.
Level: M.Arch, 502-A, Studio (Modular Studio)
Project Prompt: Architecture of Speculative Fiction
Classification: Architecture, Computational Design, Graphics
Methods: Rhino, Grasshopper, VRay for Rhino, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier Pro, 3D Printing, Sketching, Physical Modeling
This project was created in collaboration with Alan Escareño under the guidance of Professor Kathy Velikov at the University of Michigan.
The physical realities of the Triassic Landscape are a mere curtain concealing a landscape of isolation both startlingly new and immeasurably old, but in all respects overtly foreign
Quote:
"Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance." (Ballard, 25)
What began simply as odd-dreams shared by some of the members of the expedition, was revealed as a much more bizarre occurrence. Kerans soon discovered that these dreams we actually the start of a massive psychological shift in the mind, wherein they began to gain access to, what they deemed as “the archeopsychic past”
As our characters spent more time in the landscapes of the new Triassic, the further they allowed themselves to be subjected to a shedding of psychological layers, not a devolution, but a gaining of access to genetic memories encoded into the DNA of all life-forms, what we have come to know and refer to as the super-real.
Imposed with the grinding scream of the black sun, our explorers venture relentlessly southward; a voyage through geospatial time, which conjures a secondary and congruous inward descent through their own genetic memories- their Spinto-Spatial memories. Immersed in an ever-increasing flow of dreams; a hemorrhage of imaginings none can restrict bleeds forth, slowly ripping the explorers from familiar realities, plunging them ever deeper into the super-realities of the Triassic dawn.
It seems as though the wanderers have not only rejected conventional human tendencies, but also human invention. A fact that can be witnessed in their refusal to use what is left of past pieces of architecture and man-made structure.
Drawn to ever-increasing facets of the Super-Real Kerans and the other equatorial wanderers engaged the environment seeking to give form to their genetic memories.
From genetic memories of biological processes our equatorial wanderers have begun to create super-real archetypes of form and structure manifesting in the real wherein the super-realists are catalysts of production.
These types of architecture then, begin to act as a bridge wherein the super-real bleeds into the real. Architecture in this sense, acts, not so much as an intended shelter, rather, an incidental one. Our formulation of these structures began through observing recursive geometries found in nature. More specifically, the recursive geometries found within fundamental biological processes. We looked at cross-organism molecular structures more commonly known as the ancient proteins. Based upon these processes, we formulated assemblages rooted in the super-real.
Kerans and the other super-realists formed these aquatic cocoons; baked in the boiling silt of the equatorial jungles as products of primal fear and genetic confluence. Lifted from the landscape by the traveling belts of silt the cocoons now scatter the terrain as fragments of fear and memory.