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strip : AEROPHYTE_X : custom surfaces

AEROPHYTE_X - Stripped-Down Villa : Micro-Estate - S*D*V . 02

Jason Vigneri-Beane <jcvb@splitstudio.com>

Project Statement

Stripped-Down Villas : Micro-Estates (S*D*V) are part of an on-going project thatcompact selected aspects of luxuriant living conditions down to a formulation of MICRO-ESTATES.

A few of ways in which normative architecture seems not to be able to come astride with developments in the contemporary world are scale (size), mobility and intelligence. While competition over space increases in relation to population growth measured against available real estate, normative (residential) architecture continues to become increasingly larger. While other disciplines and industries have been developing techniques of miniaturization architecture has been participating in the production of wasteful enlargement on a number of fronts, from material use to environmental conditioning. One could almost say that size equals both present and future waste. It may not be a stretch to say that size is in a feedback-relationship with (lack of) mobility. While normative architecture is obviously and understandably involved in the production of fixed objects on fixed grounds there is something to learn from the range of alternative architectural lessons demonstrated by informal settlements, trailer parks, displaced populations and societies organized by collective intelligence. In these conditions, the question of a fixed relationship between living space and property is in play and, although complex, strategic and finely-tuned, also minimal. What is important to note here is that the combination of object-location relationships and the evolution of an object in relation to the specificities of how it must perform in its non-normative state leads, in a sense, to an adaptive intelligence that is specific to site and program without being fixed to them. This special formulation of specificity without fixity shows in a kind of non-optimized efficiency wherein architectural identities and the operations out of which they emerge are clarified, distilled and compacted without genericizing normalization. This interest in compacted architectural operations and constrained identity form the basic framework within which both Stripped-Down Shelters and Stripped-Down Villas / Micro-Estates are developed.

SDV.02 --- AEROPHYTE_X is a future niche-filler for innovative habitats. It is a compact multi-level living unit that has a non-invasive yet reciprocal relationship with its location in that is does not penetrate the ground but does irrigate it with nutrient-rich run-off that asists in cultivating a vegetative perimeter of soft-differentiation. Its rooftop catchment basin stores 220 gallons of water for filtered domestic use and its array of twenty-six planters fosters both a hanging screen of vegetation and drip-nozzles for ground-level irrigation. The bottom panel of the living encasement acts both as elevator to the rasied unit and operable patio for indoor/outdoor living. It also comes equipped with skylights and a rooftop lighting array for ease of location in innovative habitats. The AEROPHYTE_X exists in anticipation of impending crises over normative uses of land in relation to continuing consolidated privatization, differential population expansion, pressure on habitats through climate change, emergent forms of settlement and so on.