landscrapers.energy.spectacle
Utilizing building landscapes to harness, produce, or recycle energy. A provocation to understand the exploration of the earth’s surface through the creation of program.
Lebbeus Woods defines building landscapes as simply the possibilities of fusing buildings and landscape. Thom Mayne has coined this definition hybrid landscapes. Antoine Predock talks about building landscapes as a process through a term called landscrapers which explores the process of a building unfolding the land instead of being placed on top of it. Predock also considers this an “act of making a new nature rather then replacing nature with human order.” I seek to take all of these aforementioned design tools to a level of greater detail that provokes the superficial intent of employing the surface of the land to create program. Additionally, I intend to investigate the ecological responsibilities of the earth to promote unity, harness energy for use or distribution, and exploring how this process will define the space that will contain architectural program.
How can an exploration of the earth’s surface create program for necessary functions? How can this design innovation create the production of “clean energy”? How can building landscapes create both an utilitarian understanding of the program of architecture and the ability to create/recycle energy? What program could play out this idea and require enough space to contain the production of energy on a urban scale?
Lately, an interest in sports and the spectacle of sports has aspired to work its way into the thesis. Stadia might contain possibility to analyze and play-out the idea of the thesis above. Typically in urban settings and normally a seasonally occupied structure, the availability to incorporate the thesis into this program may present an idiosyncratic approach to the investigation of the thesis. This will present new questions to probe and analyze. How would the spectacle of sports change? How could the spectacle change? What other ideas of the spectacle, energy, and landscape present itself through this exploration?
My overall interests lies in an understanding of how the discipline can utilize the surface of the earth itself to define program for our current culture as well as the adaption of future cultures. However, this idea could take on another role in understanding how the formation of building landscapes seek to form the program of occupied space instead of the typical role of defining the occupied space and then forming the landscape around it. The idea of sport may contradict this idea, however the thesis may choose to explore just the social interaction with people, landscape, and program as well.
A greater understanding of the composition of the layers of the earth’s surface will yield multiple artifacts. Through various mediums and techniques, the artifacts will assist in understanding the thesis at scale unreachable through words. Investigating the materials and the process of excavation of various materials that compose layers of the earth in building landscapes as well as multiple explorations of energy and composition of energy is desired. Energy may be explored through chemical analysis which will be graphically or physically interpreted.
