WAVERING ON THE SHOAL
I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud/ That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd/ A host, of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
---- “Daffodils” William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
What? The prelude:
The inspiration of my design originated from the conception of the above quoted poem of William Wordsworth. What I have been trying to do is to capture “the ambiguity of the ratio between imagination and fact in producing the ideal concept of ‘Nature’”(THAIS E. MORGAN Rereading Nature: Wordsworth between Swinburne and Arnold, P435) , in a similar way to what the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of Heterotopias is about: that spaces as juxtaposition of different elements are to achieve a new kind of relationship and understanding.
What is the project like?
The way I will treat the site is to tenderly and sensitively touch the landscape, a lagoon a few dozen yards from the Thames River. The whole project floats on the lagoon, constantly wavering respectively and reactively to time and weather. The small-scale devices are dispersed in the landscape functionally and formally, obscurely residing in the complicated and ever-changing environment while creating an interactive landscape of a co-existence of reality, poetry and memory, thus enhancing the ecological and aesthetical properties of the said environment.
The necessity of this project in this particular site?
Lagoons are a delicate and somewhat atrocious ecosystem full of salts and alkalis, facing the hidden ecological crisis of salination, sedimentation and erosion. The aim of the project is to flurish this stagnant site, improve micro-ecological environment and simultaneously change forms to cater to changes in the surroundings to create an exciting atmosphere, therefore upgrading the quality of the site.
The methodology of the project
The principal methodology of the project is transformation of natural power architecturally. In order to adopt the most ecological and least harmful method to influence and fit the whole project in this landscape, I will try to utilise the kinetic energy of wavering reeds and swimming birds to be transferred underwater or transformed into electric energy or heat energy. Supported by aforementioned energy supply, we can design devices to influence and alter turbulence and sedimentation positively. The device will also be able to control regional site temperatures to affect the distribution of water plants and microorganisms. Therefore in the long term, a new landscape is in the making. Another key point is how to capture the limited and unevenly distributed natural power in the whole site. I am adopting the time-based research methodology, using videos to record the areas where the birds activties are the most frequent and their boarding spots. These areas are places where energy is most obtainable and sufficient.
In all, this design is both low speed landscape in terms of changing landscape beneath the water and high speed landscape in terms of making instant and sensitive responds to changes in the environments, wavering on the shoal.
