For the first time in my short life, I am starting to feel old. Not because I have physically aged all that much—my skin still has a great deal of elasticity—but because I cannot figure out Grasshopper. No, not the natural variety of grasshopper that jumps around the yard, but the generative modelling software by the same name.

Unable to design via generative algorithms, I am forced to rely on antiquarian inventions such as the sketchpad and pen, along with my primitive Homo sapien brain (there is also the marginally more advanced Autocad and unadulterated Rhino). When confronted with those rare design problems that cannot be solved through any other means, there is always that last fallback, which is to take advantage of perceived aged-ness and demand the help of that younger more tech savvy generation, also known as “the intern”. This feat carried through in confidence, with the knowledge that someday they too will stumble upon their own Grasshopper and the cycle will begin anew.

James Cameron and other moneyed Hollywood producers are not the only non-architects generating imagined landscapes out of 21st century digital software. Many young artists and filmmakers are producing works which present new ways to understand architecture by recontextualizing spatial imagery, using the methods of related disciplines.

In the English artist Thomas Lock’s piece Breaking Points—a project which is influenced by Paulo Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology—grand melancholic photographs of weather-beaten war bunkers sited on the French coast have been programmed, using Open Framework, so that they are randomly selected from a bank of hundreds to create a moving image which continuously destructs and constructs itself. With a similar dynamism, the French artist Thomas Léon’s film Living in the Ice Age is created with Lightwave 3D and Blender. In this work, an abandoned building is placed in the middle of a frigid landscape and as the sun rises and sets… more

E. Sean Bailey

Josefine Wikström

In 1986, Tour of the Universe, a space flight simulator for the masses, opened at the CN Tower in Toronto. Making use of two Boeing 747 simulators, the ride rattled passengers in sync with a projection of a flight towards Jupiter, asteroid collisions and all. While the ride gained local notoriety as ‘the world’s first simulator-based attraction’, to this young visitor, even more significant than the simulated space travel was the space/time travel required to access these future technologies. Before experiencing the ride proper, passengers were led to an elevator transporting them not only forty years into the future, but to a space port located 1,816 feet beneath the ground, as deep as the CN Tower is tall. Void of windows, it was impossible to tell the real depth of the space station, and so the illusion of a subterranean inverted tower was maintained. (In reality, the ride was located in the tower’s basement level, a few mere feet below ground.)

In 2004, artist Euan Macdonald produced The Tower, a full scale replica of the top twenty-five feet of the CN Tower, the remainder of the structure having been buried after millions of years of geological sedimentation. While not a deliberate reaction to the Tour of the Universe, the two pieces are linked by their common subject matter, the CN Tower, but also by their use of the subterranean world to cloud our understanding of our present reality. The only means of disproving either of these mythologies with confidence is to dig.

The act of digging often works in tandem with sheltering, typically as a means of collecting resources or clearing space. In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film, Woman in the Dunes, digging becomes essential for survival. For the sometimes amorous protagonists—a widow and an entymologist—who are trapped in a house at the bottom of a sandpit, clearing the sand to ensure that their dwelling is not buried by the encroaching dunes is critical. The character of the sand, remains unforgivingly and unapologetically itself, and the design of the house does little to withstand the nature of its context. As a result, the building and its inhabitants are isolated, threatened, controlled, abused and irritated by their environment.

Social problems exacerbate physical ones, with the local community trapping the couple in the pit. They are denied basic supplies and even water if they refuse to dig. The community depends on the survival of the widow’s house in order to preserve the structure of the neighborhood, if her house fails then those nearby will also inevitably fail. The community also relies on sales from the sand, which is sold illegally to the city (despite its high salinity). Thus, the stability of the village is contingent on the integrity of the house, which depends on clearing the sand, which is then sold to the city to build ultimately unstable buildings.

In this world, stability and instability are inter-dependent.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva