AIR_CULEX

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strip : AIR_CULEX : custom graphics

AIR_CULEX - Stripped-Down Villa : Micro-Estate - S*D*V . 05

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.05 --- AIR_CULEX is a future niche-filler for innovative habitats in unpopulated environments such as swamps, bogs, bayous, deltas, marshlands, wetlands and other wet-logged landscapes. It is a compact living unit that reflects the pressure on architectural equipment to coevolve with non-normative sites in a way that is independent of property/grounding yet highly specified to interface with natural/non-natural provisions such as airflow and water. A five-unit array of compact turbines gives it just enough lift to hover above any fluid-saturated landscape and drift from one location to another. A dual-proboscis array allows its owner to siphon and filter water for domestic use. AIR_CULEX is airborne, short-run mobile and, due to its structural self-sufficiency and resource independence, sees micro-living as interconnected with property-independence and decentralized infrastructure.