SIMON MCKENZIE ARCHITECTURE
PROTEUS MOVES
NEW TERRITORIES OF THE FORMAL AND MATERIAL IMAGINATION
This project explores the art of architecture imagined through space, time, and motion. Focusing in particular on philosophical concepts, technologies and practices within the spatial and temporal arts. Referencing written work of Bachelard and the sublimity of nature, this project is an examination of the spatial qualities of natural material. The ambition is to explore new territories of the formal and material imagination. Drawing not only from architecture, but the temporal arts of poetry, music, and cinematography where durational space and an architecture of time is ever present.
The project began by selecting a 10-second video clip of a natural element - in this case water. Ice surges upward and pierces the surface, while water falls downward. Forces of gravity are pinned against buoyancy.
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After selecting water as a source of inspiration, the task was to transform various materials into a form that captured the temporal movement of this alchemical element.
After transposing the material qualities from the referenced video clip into an exterior model, 'interior' models were constructed. The exercise was to create an interior space that captured the emotional affect of the original source inspiration. Once completed, user program was defined and the spaces were developed with architectural intention.
`Sports and bodily exercise mark the threshold between nature and culture, between the body as a manifestation of animal-like nature and the trained body as expression of cultured life.`
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-p.94, The Space of Play
Studies of Darkness and Vacuity
Material explorations combined with programmatic analysis, gave shape to a ‘Palaestra’, which is an ancient facility for the simultaneous training of the mind and body.
