Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Natural Spaces

Natural Spaces  
We will begin by visiting the wild life reserve Bangpoo situatied on along the coastline of Samut Prakan just south of Bangkok. Bangpoo is famous for bird watching during the dry season when rare birds migrate from the north to escape the cold, but Bangpoo also provides some of the most lush mangrove forests and a variety of other species of plants.   We will explore the  intricate and visceral spatial qualities produced by threes, shrub’s and weed’s. We will be working in groups of three with one specifically selected natural space in the Bangpoo for each group. The space will be measured photographed, filmed, sketched and scanned. This material will then be processed and converted to digital 3D models and drawings from which analytic conclusions can be drawn.

Architects seldom speak of natural spaces like forests, meadows, fields, jungles etc in terms of spatial qualities. Perhaps this is because architects, unlike landscape architects have very little training in talking and even thinking about them as spaces.  Perhaps it even has something to do with the fact that architects find it hard to judge something that has not been created by man.

The particular formation of a little opening in a forest for instance has no force as a single unit, there is no designer.  Every single living organism in the space has through evolution an empirical behaviour with clear goals, but they all operate independently and with no oversight, such as a designer would have had. The independent forces from each plant, the conditions given by the land, the climate and the sun offers such a complex and intricate network of events that is incomprehensible to most people, and perhaps especially for architects who tend to seek the bigger picture. Perhaps the final most inexplicable fact about a space in nature is that it is in constant change. As long as it is alive, it is growing and decaying in a pace that is not possible for us to perceive in the moment, but if it was possible for us, to speed up time, as is possible with a film camera we would see the boiling energy in constant and never ending change as plants fall and rise.

We will through our observations and survey of a natural space in the Bangpoo, full of life, complexity and change work towards growing more cerebral fibres , bridging the gap between our rational knowledge about plants and ecosystems, and the more emotional and subjective sensitivity we cannot ignore when observing nature.

Perhaps the most dictating factor in wild nature is the phenomenology of the changing climatic conditions such as seasons and the radical change from night till day. We will spend a full day at the Bangpoo observing the changes in light, temperature and atmosphere.

The final goal for this first phase is to produce drawings and physical models that through abstraction manages to describe the static spatial conditions of the space. Ones this is done each member of the group will chose one subjective reading of the space to develop further, using the material collectively produced by the group.

The choice of space should be done considering the following points

  • Complexity. That the space presents a satisfying amount of spatial and formal complexity. 
  • Biodiversity. That the space presents a high of different species and types of plants. 
  • Enclosure. That the space presents a clear enclosure that produces something that could be defined as a space or a volume.  

     

No comments:

Post a Comment