Bunker in Surrey

My friend Nat, with whom many conversations about defensive systems and architectures of defense happen, tipped me to the Atlantic Wall in Surrey. These are the practical external defences of wartime - ww1 and ww2 specifically. Today, these are mute and tangled in overburden and overgrowth, but recently presented 'solids' and 'patterns' that resisted rather than decorated. In forests and fields, not remote but in strategic outskirts. The image here may or may not be from Surrey.

repeated/edited/ Oslo's Basement

East from Snøhetta’s Opera House to Bygdø’s ‘relocated’ stave church at the western end, here is my model of Oslo; the working title being ‘Oslo’s Basement’. It seemed that making a model of Oslo would be a good way of thinking about being in a different city. Oslo has the requisite range of buildings pedestrian to brilliant, and I settled on four buildings and one ‘cavity’ (a hole actually), plus a door (#6). Beginning with the events of 22/11, two (damaged) office structures were selected and then two more buildings of artistic and cultural distinction seemed essential counterpoint to compensate for the trauma of the others. An assortment, treated with two ‘logics’. The two artistic structures are cradled. The plinth or tray for the four buildings is determined as the minimum footprint that would frame the foursome – a fragment of Oslo as a map. Describing the topography of the city seemed important but beyond my research, so a grill suggesting landforms was built-up as though a weedy matrix between the four modeled forms. The grill and the plinth’s structural geometry beneath, form the main void of the piece – which becomes the idea of a basement. The basement is the default condition, and essential to the urban form without having any itself. 

tanks

This photo captures the best of favourite worlds. Contemporary architecture, contemporary military gear (well, last generation tanks, current generation opera house).

Oslo's Basement

heavy arabeque

At the top is a wet, lumbering arabesque at its material origin - a kind of antithesis of the target. Below is the planetary view of origin...much lighter, despite its 'inner tube' looks. This extraction from a torus is by Yusef Dennis.