The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river.
Asymmetry is local on a chain and is propagated globally the length of a series, through transitivity. They make a line.
The relation upsets equilibrium, making it deviate. If some equilibrium exists or ever existed somewhere, somehow, the introduction of a parasite in the system immediately provokes a difference, a disequilibrium.
Immediately, the system changes; time has begun.
Michel Serres
Parasite (1982)
filo fragment fictions.
M.Arch Project (2011-2013)
Olbia, Sardinia.
Project in collaboration with Louisa Butler.
Filo Fragment Fictions engages with the city of Olbia in the north-east of Sardinia, as an agency primarily concerned with the socio-economic conditions currently in operation within both low-density urbanity and its surrounding landscape.
A layered conception of historic, cultural and architectural conditions provides the project with a fertile point of departure. [filo]
Questioning how such conditions have arisen becomes the parti for a series of interrogation exercises carried out on a series of sites and programmes across the cities coast, aimed at understanding the disjointed nature between urbanity and landscapes. [fragment]
Architecture of both corporeal and incorporeal species is used on the sites to investigate relationships between the urban and tectonic; socio and economic; life-story and live-project, on the scales of body, building and landscape. [fictions]
Serres’ critique of the classical logic of identity is based on a ‘third man’ argument and personified as the one-way relations of the parasite. By simply understanding this chain within the context of, as Serres suggests, para (to one side of) and site (the being or form), we seek the implications of this on a series of architectural territories. The project, as a series (or chain) of parasites, create disequilibrium within current planning paradigm of Olbia.
Five projects – five enzymatic territories – explore the notion of a reciprocal, caring relationship between architecture and landscape of augmented edges on the scales of body, building, city, landscape and region.
Each territory entails its own particular temporal edge condition, however they each share a degree of endurance – a resilience to the monocultural smoothness posed by the tourist industry – that allows them to be used as testing grounds for an architecture that exists between these conditions.
i. tourist + resident.
The resident and tourist cross paths in the ever-extending ferry port, Isola Bianca. The enduring and temporal figures of Olbia meet on very thin ground. There is cause for re-articulation of the relationship between these figures, who are at once political, economic and archtiectural. They are developed as fictions, but embedded in current, serious and urgent narratives.
Originating as a marginal figure in the landscape, the man-made port has since immersed three small natural islands, symptomatic of this masking effect.
Relative to this process sits the Cartographer: a resident of Olbia, a character shaped by the changing territory of the port. The Cartographer becomes obsesed with the city's edgescape, frantically drawing and re-drawing fixes and changes.
Cartography of the landscape and fragmenting of the port are ultimately understood as one in the same process at different scales: both are seen as ways of drawing landscape differently - a way that is concerned with edges. This concern effectively becomes an embodiment of experimental drawings methodology, setting up and developing a position on a metropolitan landscape through our drawing process.
ii. cartographer.
iii. fisherman.
The fisherman creates a ‘temporary' residence positioned on an augmented landscape.
The fisherman’s presence is challenged by the recurrence of change; apparent tectonic durability is rendered as temporary as that of the tourists who come and go.
There is a suggestive poetry to the understanding of the fisherman (a metaphor for the slow-moving economy over-thrown by the fast-paced tourist) as an architectural condition - an edge that is continually and slowly eroded by determined movement. It sits in tension with the ever-present risk of the caretaker's departure.
Perhaps the fisherman - out of loyalty - will never leave?
iv. caretaker.
As the stories are played out as architectural propositions, we begin to understand edge condition as a generator for the situation of additional fragments.
The caretaker provides means of simultaneously considering fragmentation and connectivity. Anchoring herself to the lighthouse, she can oversee and easily navigate the edges of Olbia. She mediates between the scale of the metropolitan landscape and the body-scale tectonics of enduring and tempral architectural pieces.
What this reveals is an architecture that exists in a state of erosion, as though the care is due to expire and Olbia will be left to ruin.
The scrappy and boat-builder move into a derelict shipping scrapyard - a site of tourist detritus whereby the found object, namely yachts, fibreglass etc. become points of departure for programmatic distribution. The delamination of which promotes the development of programmes, processes of construction and the enduring and temporal relations between figure and ground. The situation becomes a Boat Builder's Academy with boat-stripping and recycling facilities, workshop and rowing club.
v. scrappy + boat builder.
Specificity of architecture in-SITU is explored by allowing material construction of the building in elevation to adopt and develop the material language of the site: a slow-rusting façade allows the building simultaneously augment the ground-figure relationship, whilst acting as a register of time.
Each narrative embodies tensions that exist between conditions of temporality and endurance - from the hybrid nature of the building programs, their situation, and the relations between tectonic elements of the construction drawings package – a document comprised of a series of drawings developing the nature of various key assemblies.
