Borderlands
SuperStudio 4
Niall McBrierty, Studio Tutor
Martin Barrett, Studio Tutor
RESIST—DELAY—CAPITLATE
What is?—what for?—where to?— and what then?
What is context? What scale is context?
Context is: ambient, atmosphere, climate, clime, contexture, environment, environs, medium, milieu, mise-en-scène, setting, surround, surroundings, terrain
The context of our site, the UN climate Change Report, context is global and molecular. The context is about real and perceived conditions and things. History, Myth, Buildings , landscape , geology , geology and sunlight, buildings and sunlight, both perceived and metrological atmospheres.
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” ― John Berger, Ways of Seeing
The site: At the apex of the ford, lodged or imposed onto a landscape as an antagonistic editor, both reinforcing existing conditions and transforming others. This is manifested in a rectalinear protagonist at the junction traversing canal and river and Newry and the ford. The location at the end of a fallopian like sequence has two primary conditions , wetland and island (dry) both conditions are part of singular body.
RESIST—DELAY—CAPITULATE
To create and sustain the new structure it operates a singular ecology resitting, delaying and capitulating to future conditions. These operating conditions will provide energy to supply both public and domestic architecture. To maintain the efficiency of the new ecology the architecture will reflect these operating conditions, RESIST, DELAY, CAPITULATE.
Nature culture verus Synthetic culture.
“the human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.”
One is following a pure ecological route, that is we will find / return to a balance in which humans and nature where somehow united. The alterative argument is one which accepts that the former relationship with nature never existed. Slavoj Zizec states ‘“nature does not exist’’ the human relationship to environment is one were survival is purely synthetic. So over time we have gradually become divorced from our environment / ecology and our survival or demise will be manmade (synthetic). This is reinforced by body modifications: plastic surgery, sexual transformation. There are many ways to see ecology and man’s role in or outside nature, but manipulation of the body and its survival environment is by choice or necessity partly or completely synthetic. The perceived tension between Nature and culture can be characterised by RESIST, DELAY AND CAPITULATE.