Aqueotrope
Speculative Proposal for a Vivarium 2011
This speculative proposal for a vivarium that engages with aquifer matrices, is designed to encapsulate a series of diverse microclimates. The project shares atmospheric qualities with cenotes, deep aqueous sinkholes that form surface connections to subterranean water bodies. Liquefaction produces a state of indifferentiation that disrupts and tends toward the obliteration of discrete identities. As a process it involves a shift from the precisely figured toward a more entropic state, approaching the abject. It subjects exactitude to the vagaries of matter in flux. The envelope of architecture extends, it’s clear delimitation becomes viscid. Rhizomatic secretions through pores in its surface display a hyper-geotropism, incapable of being described as positive or negative as in the directional growth of an organism responding to gravity. Unlike the play of gravitational forces that directs viscous matter, aqueotrope responds to a different gravitational field, more hydraulic than terrestrial, more bouyant than massive. Orbicular morphologies populate its interior, mushrooming amidst vegetal poche. Their materiality suggests the vitreous humor of the eye. The precisely figured melts into “the fragile border where identities do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” This entropic state is approached through a conscious embrace of corrupting influences, the introduction of those unnamable entities that reconfigure our formulations of cohesion, coagulating into an abject sensibility.
Project Design - servo >> Design Partners - Ulrika Karlsson, Marcelyn Gow >> Design Team - Jonah Fritzell
