Monday, October 18, 2010

What have you architecturally designed?

I have never taken an actual architecture class, but I wrote that goal after spending months in my basement as a kid drawing in great detail a massive multi-story mansion for myself (complete with an experimental nuclear laboratory adjoining my bedroom, which I must say is a fantastic place for it)- Now any design that I freehand for fun in an hour not using exact scale or "load bearing" (carbon nano-tubules solve such things) seems to carry several common properties:

It's a power station ---- enough alternative energy production and your building begins to radiate the excess as one of the "triple zero" constructs

It's a death fortress ---- there are two schools of thought in the environmental community on building construction; the first is that structures should be built with lightweight, perfectly recyclable materials that will be easy to disassemble by avoiding the use of toxic glue, and the second is to build a structure that will never need to be torn down because it is impregnable, unbreakable, and reinforced to the point that the last humans on Earth can use it to throw a going away party.

There is gothic statuary ---- I may have been warped by my visits to various cultural centers in the ancient world, I don't know why a bicycle parking garage, a planetarium, a parkour track, a penitentiary, etc. has need of ornate statues along the roofs and walkways. Still if Jason DeCaires Taylor is building an underwater Elysium we can do our best to match him here on land.



There are secret passages ---- well obviously.

The landscape is dominated by moss ----
this reflects an actual preference of mine against the time and resources wasted on excessive yard work that could carry into reality.

Supercomputers govern hilariously unneeded adaptations ---- there are no elevators in my designs, people descend or ascend on silent waves of compressed air tied to motion sensors with lugubrious failsafes and safety parameters, gardens in the darkest part of the northern hemisphere are tended by patrolling sun lamps with arms, a Guggenheim exhibit makes all of the walls  blink in and out of existence, so all one is left with is the ramp and some floating canvases, and heavenly choruses accompany most interactions with appliances (No one needs to perform data reductions or fluid modeling with the instrumentation any more).

The only departure I have made from this pattern is a series of artificial islands I designed to be an obstacle museum near the Islas los Roques, where patrons have to really exert themselves climbing narrow peaks and rafting down treacherous straights to access the different exhibits... only the very dedicated get to see latest Asian plastic Chihuahua collages. Also I invented a new(?) concept called Destruction Architecture: To demolish parts of an existing work in an expressive manner, or to modify functionality (e.g. narrowing door-swing aperture within a building to a point of uncomfortability, blowing up part of a wall, etc.)

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