2019_10wks
Tybee Island Community and Disaster Relief Center
The island being sold to the
common, has unsettled the brilliantly uncommon, it’s nature. Buildings built
swallowing land, what is left monocropped, devoid of diversity. Nature evaded, segregated
pushed away to the sea and marsh, to make way for the human comfort.
But is nature really “away”, packed up, tidily moved, somewhere more convenient? No.
Nature, something so wild, great, and divine would not be subjugated by the hubris of human existence. Hurricanes, brewed of wind and water, will attack, every year, bearing with them only too familiar themes of years past. Same water, same wind, same destruction, different year, different place (maybe). Though we construct with swords drawn poised to take on this Goliath we fall, inevitably, into the flooded grave that awaits us.
So, it must be asked, can a building do anything to stop this?
No.
Gismos and gadgets are developed, produced and installed, to avert disaster. They shift water, hold back driving rains, deflect flying trees. But in time they will break, forgotten to be deployed, they will be out of date, eventually they will fail.
Parts fail and buildings break.
This mass is an artifact. The eroded: dissolved by the systems which impact it, a piece of manufactured stone subservient to the forces which act on it, left to be eaten away by surroundings. Beaten by the erosion it aims to combat, washed away by what is truly greater than itself. The carved: a collection of spaces intentionally dug out of the mass, developed to enhance use, rectilinear volumes to fit human use, the architectural language most commonly understood. The ruby cube: platonic, rational, symmetrical, a perfect ideal. But there is a dimple left by the glass blower, one of the sides marred, an imperfection, the stain on perfect, now only a shape. Hope overlooks the dimple for hope is not the perfect; however, the aspiration toward the perfect.
A manufactured mass left to be framed by the nature we choose it to inhabit. A stone, a protector.
But is nature really “away”, packed up, tidily moved, somewhere more convenient? No.
Nature, something so wild, great, and divine would not be subjugated by the hubris of human existence. Hurricanes, brewed of wind and water, will attack, every year, bearing with them only too familiar themes of years past. Same water, same wind, same destruction, different year, different place (maybe). Though we construct with swords drawn poised to take on this Goliath we fall, inevitably, into the flooded grave that awaits us.
So, it must be asked, can a building do anything to stop this?
No.
Gismos and gadgets are developed, produced and installed, to avert disaster. They shift water, hold back driving rains, deflect flying trees. But in time they will break, forgotten to be deployed, they will be out of date, eventually they will fail.
Parts fail and buildings break.
This mass is an artifact. The eroded: dissolved by the systems which impact it, a piece of manufactured stone subservient to the forces which act on it, left to be eaten away by surroundings. Beaten by the erosion it aims to combat, washed away by what is truly greater than itself. The carved: a collection of spaces intentionally dug out of the mass, developed to enhance use, rectilinear volumes to fit human use, the architectural language most commonly understood. The ruby cube: platonic, rational, symmetrical, a perfect ideal. But there is a dimple left by the glass blower, one of the sides marred, an imperfection, the stain on perfect, now only a shape. Hope overlooks the dimple for hope is not the perfect; however, the aspiration toward the perfect.
A manufactured mass left to be framed by the nature we choose it to inhabit. A stone, a protector.
