For a long time we sat at the foot of the machine,
marveling in the feats of mankind, until all we could think
of were robots and flying things and how inconvenient it was
to have to sit on wet grass. And then from a quiet corner of
shady dusk, a fox came out to meet us, and skirted around all
the tourists snapping pictures, too busy or too proud to
notice his wild juxtaposition against the ultimate emblem of
calculated engineering, until he disappeared again into an
unseen crack between his world and ours. And we all sat wide-
eyed and silent, and felt like we were waking up from a dream,
washed in the shadow of a mechanized future.
Philoso-something:
There are two worlds constantly at play: One which we see, and know, and have built up around us; the other nearly unseen, which runs continuously silent beneath the surface, between the cracks. It is fabled that at one time, the other world dominated, and we fitted ourselves into it, piece by piece, until we took over large sections. And, though the other world abated and learned to adapt, it never quite went away. It is the world of life in its most natural, and try as we might to stop or control, it has a force much greater than we, in our machine world, understand. Nature, with its creeping fingers and slow advance, takes back piece by piece of the machine world.
There are moments, brief instances of alter realities colliding, when pieces from the other fall into the lap of ours. A fox takes a tour of the Eye. A wall is consumed in vines. It is rare that our own pieces visit unscathed the world of the natural without adaptation and perversion of form.
But… what if?
We stage a surrender.
A tiny piece is allowed to go… encouraged even! Protected from the machines and allowed to grow until it’s too daunting (or beloved) to remove. And through careful planning, we make it possible to pierce their world, unscathed, into the beating heart of the defense. Two worlds, melting for a moment, into one.
Setting the Scene for a Manifesto
Ruskin's vivid imagery of Venice and light playing off the mist and stone, captivates the imagination and instills a deep hope and longing for the Nature of his words. His captured views, peaceful panoramas, frame a harmony of Human and Nature. “The quiet village… scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream.”
There is a delicate balance at play between the two, an unwritten line of domination that neither cross; Nature has seceded one space, and Human does not reach for more.
But did this place of glorified beauty ever truly exist?
Even in this view, a silent contention persists. Beauty and Nature are a relative ideal, built on observed comparisons. Is tended farmland Nature? Whom holds whom at bay?
In Venice, the war wounds of an ageless battle define its charm; failing foundations of a sinking city. With a tenacity made possible only through the Machines Ruskin disdained, the battle at large has shifted unfailingly in our favor. The perfectly proportioned plots of Nature that dot our modern cities are hostages, feet tied in a sea of concrete.
“The last few eventful years, fraught with change to the
face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence than the five hundred that preceded them.”
The Machine has not yet won over the steady attack, and the fight goes on, beneath the surface, between the cracks. We cannot win; we cannot even truly fight because of something inherently human that calls us to protect the Natural through policy and perversion. Our sense of beauty and morality ties us to it. “All beautiful lines are adaptations of those which are commonest in the external creation; beyond a certain point, and that a very low one, man cannot advance in the invention of beauty, without directly imitating natural form.”
And so we’ve come to a place where habitats are no longer found, but created; a place where policy must be worked into the Machine in Nature’s favor. But, with Nature as our springboard for beauty, is it possible to freeze or contain more than just an abstracted line adapted from nature?
On a piece of London-proper, we stage a battle and let Nature win, only to find that this scripted relationship between the Nature and Machine worlds is a Deluzian rhizome: a multiplicity of structural elements, a dual-dependency.
Without the Machine World, this section of Nature would not exist; without the Nature, the Machine would lose its purpose, its significance, its life. The initial question arises from the irony and failures of current urban wildlife habitats, often proposed as over-tended public parks, neglected “wild” patches, or inaccessible green roofs, which either require a particularly high level of maintenance to function as habitable space or fail to protect the landscape from disruptive human intervention.
Reality?:
Initially, to receive funding from GrantScape and to fit with the Mayor’s “Biodiversity Statement,” the project is proposed as an urban wildlife habitat. It is cleverly delivered as an “urban forest” and the administration goes crazy over it, because the shear novelty attracts tourists to the overpriced café and the site requires little maintenance. Funding and planning are hurried along, eager to peak public approval.
Initial investment builds a modest installment of structural landscape, following the logic of the dividing line and plate one gradation; the spaces progress from an orderly storefront to a wild forest by the manipulation, degeneration, and expansion of Artificial (people) spaces for Nature spaces. To combat the massive waste issues of its site and surrounding context, a clever machine to produce recycled building blocks is erected at the habitat; the blocks provide an easy structural component that fosters footholds and ideal conditions for plantlife to take root and are continuously produced for further expansion.
Over time, the landscape builds itself up, propelled by the need for further inhabitable spaces and availability of resources, so that an expansive mountain and canyon range, initially conceived in the total artificial, blossoms each spring in a wild foray of natural vegetation. Infrastructure to move through the habitat remains in shrinking pockets, decaying monuments to civilization. Some spaces remain only accessible to the most adventurous climbers or children: small holes, vast caverns, sheer cliffs. But always the mountains grow, shift, decay and rebuild themselves; an artificial landscape of excessive (obsessive) Natural-ity.
Summary:
Assuming that previous “wildlife habitats” have failed for reasons related to human interaction, and to illustrate the silent contention between the Nature and Machine worlds, I propose a dense, expanding urban forest and self depreciating
viewing center. The built structure shelters the forest with a barrier of habitable spaces [street-side café, work center, isolation pods, and viewing decks] that expand out as the forest consumes the whole, to expose the anomalies of the relationship between Natural and Artificial.
How it works:
Structure: Geometric bays based on logic of the Dividing Line
Space: increasingly deformed/irregular structural wall panels and building blocks
that define structure and divide space
Materials: native vegetation, local timber, recycled + found objects, deformed
glass
Technology: Hidden support systems that augment experience of “nature” –
smell, sound, etc – an monitor the take over.
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