Based on Brighton Marina’s East Arm, the project explores how architecture could anticipate the future. Interested in how future weather can be seen coming towards you from the horizon, the research questions how architecture could generate tacit intuitions such as ‘Red sky at night, Shepherd’s delight’ - experienced as the uncanny feeling that something is going to happen. It imagines a research facility that creates dependencies between scientists in the pursuit of knowledge about the future, and local communities with a tacit understanding of it; by way of their connection to the coastal landscape. An ecology of disparate anticipations is formed.
Year 4 Project
Unit x25: Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews, Jerry Tate Site Location: Brighton Marina, England
Date: January - May 2021
The Bartlett Online Summer Show 2021
X25 Website
Unit x25: Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews, Jerry Tate Site Location: Brighton Marina, England
Date: January - May 2021
The Bartlett Online Summer Show 2021
X25 Website
Anticipatory Tectonics
Early studies looking at how spaces could provide knowledge about the future. Silicone spaces become taught or slack depending on air pressure, indicative of weather changes.
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An Ecology of Disperate Anticipations
Dependencies between communities are designed, based upon the exchange of verbal anticipations. The above image deals with the relationship between fisherman and marine biologists. One with tacit knowledge, one with explicit - they both mutually gain from the spatial exchange.
These relationships construct an ecology.
Water Mediates the Exchange
The hard barrier of Brighton’s marina wall is broken down, and the force of the waves diffuse through the facility. The water provides a spatial connection to the landscape, whilst mediating conversational exchange through the acoustic/drainage layers.
Short Section
Three primary temporalities are detected.
The deep future - an eroding chalk ‘geology’ gives a sense of long term change; The immediate future - silicone spaces vary in tautness depending upon incoming weather; and the uncertain (and possibly false) near future - overheard through conversations reverberating through an acoustic structural layer.
Three primary temporalities are detected.
The deep future - an eroding chalk ‘geology’ gives a sense of long term change; The immediate future - silicone spaces vary in tautness depending upon incoming weather; and the uncertain (and possibly false) near future - overheard through conversations reverberating through an acoustic structural layer.
Porosity Strengthens Relationships
As weather becomes increasingly more unpredictable over time, the facility becomes ever more porous and unstable -
increasing the generation and transmission of anticipations between its inhabitants.