if you want to see some spaces and objects where I was involved
if you want to text me
if you want to check some formalities
– tom :)
if you want to see some spaces and objects where I was involved
if you want to text me
if you want to check some formalities
– tom :)
The Distance of the Earth
Architectural Design Research, 2024
-
In a time of environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and climate change, we tend to overlook things happening unintentionally next to us. In a culture and economy, dominated by neoliberal approaches, most things and beings outside the visual-pictorial world remain either as granted objects or as completely forgotten. Accidentally, filthy, and unwelcome in most places, dust troubles our perceptions of nature and how it is (re-)produced through the fetishistic dominance of the visual image.
My incipient travel brings me to Graz, reading “A Wild Thing” by Hilde Bouchez. The architectural exploration begins around an abandoned site directly within the urban context. On behalf of dust, the thesis follows the question of how spaces can be read like texts and how texts can be constructed like spaces. The main project becomes a situated writing with different real and not-so-real experiences, jumping between an allegorical space and the existing site in Graz. It attempts to develop an authentic representation within the debate about the dichotomy of nature/culture and dynamics of the Earth.
Based on the writing, a physical public intervention responds to the site as a performative space and invitation into our world full of tiny particles. A moment when in a darker void — music, other people, and from time to time a light beam — all intersect. At this exact moment, it might be a blur between artificial and natural. The thesis does not argue for abolishing all maintenance strategies, but rather knowing and understanding the Earth more accurately. This muddled approach draws influence from performative writings of Jozef Wouters, dreamy links to Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon” and embodied writings of McKenzie Wark.
So, Krzkz starts travelling through the filthy outside and arrives at an abandoned landscape in a city full of dust. After reading the buildings. Krzkz closes her eyes and dreams about a new place – an event full of dust to make you see nothing, but the dependency of your own eyes vision.
The design (dream) links the front yard with the backyard. A breakthrough itself requires the removal of six windows. Krzkz closes the inner room with dust traps and makes use of the darkness to install light beams through the air. She positions the entrance as a distraction for the wind, mostly from the west, to slow it down and make it float around. Any light from the outside remains indirect. The installed materials will alter and grow over time as a result of human bodies and natural wind force.
It involves a structure with existing beams from the abandoned site. Textiles wrapped around the polycarbonate panels create dust attractors. She places the intervention right inside the windiest location to create a funnel. Half of the installation remains outside, the other half inside, the transition would become an effect of bright to dark, pure to filth – losing own’s vision while seeing the most in small reflections of dust particles.
-
Location
Graz, Austria
Team
Tom Kohrs