07.20.2005
Hobby Barnfield operations
architecture as landscape > < landscape as architecture
tracking natural and social geographies of an historic site
Premise:
A site is animated (in time and by desire) by its latent programs, spatial organizations, and existing architectures. And inversely, a program is activated by a site, by a physical and social situation–milieu–that it must negotiate. Site and program are co-dependent and intimately related concepts. Together they form a relational and transactional model of a bio-social and bio-techno landscape or field. A site, under this model, is a relational landscape or relational geographies to be more precise, that is not so much “pictured” as navigated and mapped as a fluid spatial-temporal event, as a chain of events that generates and allows for new unexpected functional and spatial affiliations and effects, a new architectonics of experience, to emerge in the embodied and embedded subject (the body as active participant in this new landscape, this multi-layered and changing landscape that moves along and negotiates a changing set of uses and materials along a continuous contour or line.)
Here we have attempted to craft and organize material conditions not only in terms of space and place, but time and culture. This small-scale intervention or reinvention of landscape seeks to navigate both man-made conditions for human activities and movement as well as biological systems and flows within the matrix of single architectural geometry or line.
This is a temporal program. The emphasis on the temporal and fluid dimensions of site and program is intentional. It underscores the recent shifts in progressive architectural design and practice away from the architectural object and the formal procedures that produce it to an inquiry into architectural surface and effects, on the organization and flow of media and information (ambient and atmospheric effects). It represents a rejection of the autonomous object and its formal logic and a turn towards an examination of cultural logic, of historical, social and technological networks and their co-mingling with natural systems.
