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Rare Minerals
Disciplines
Post Planetary Design
Architectural Theory
Landscape Architecture
Sound Design
Experience Design
Collaborators
The New Centre for Research & Practice
Exhibited at:
Romanian Architecture Biennale '24, Bucharest
Status
Independent Research Project
2012 - 2015
2022 - ongoing
“Architecture does not exist as an object of knowledge outside of what physicists call intermediate dimensions. At the scale of the very big or the very small, one may speak of the architecture of cosmos or the intimate architecture of matter”
Fire and Memory, by Luis Fernández-Galiano
Mineral #5
Mineral #4
Mineral #3
Mineral #2
Mineral #1
an album of urban experiences
Yet, we have built a historic architectural career, sculpting space and drying in matter an enduring discourse the more we dared to explore the depths of our interiority, offsetting it as a righteous armour each time we gained a bit more territory of knowledge: a journey-form on a mission.
If following the path of this career, how shall we capture, portray or in-form the nature, materiality and phenomenology of architecture in fast-forward movement as it speeds with our increasingly algorithmic techno-culture? If not following the path of this career, blending it with others that share familiar matters, which is the object of knowledge of our progressive discourse?
If not following anything at all, moved by plain wonder and the inherent physics of our nature, how is it best to sit in a polyphonic field of intentions, unchartered, yet subject to a mass of contractions?
"A sound accomplishes nothing; without it, life would not last out of the instant.
Urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, its becoming is unimpeded, energetically broadcast. There is no escape of its actions. It does not exist as one series of discrete steps, but as transmission in all directions from the field's centre."
Silence, by John Cage, American composer & music theorist
Rare Minerals is an adventure into this wilderness and all of the ideas above, carrying a nerdy travelling journal and camping the imagination in five locations around the world, to finally assemble itself as an album of urban experiences.
At core, it is a landscape / architectural endeavour, be-freeing itself of the task to resume in concrete matter a dynamic and intimate dimension that belongs to each to discover. Yet, it carries the spark, the brew of its momentum and the charge to last out of the instant - and that is architectural enough.
Rare Minerals is a response coming after years of silence and reflection over the practice and agency of architecture and landscape architecture, particularly in the age of technological disruption, where speed challenges the understanding of our basic anatomy, its capacity and, perhaps, its unknown extensions.
While artificial intelligence is recording in the background of our daily lives a negative blueprint of our persona (as a negative picture to be transferred into its positive) rapidly matching, inter-connecting and assembling data, a more dynamic and modular domain of existence is emerging from our on/off digital culture.
This domain is still a wilderness to be tamed. It emerges out of practical ecological constraints (clean energy, clean climate), technological demands (raw materials, rare earth supplies, energy once more), economical duets (crypto vs. old school money), cultural perspectives (value attributing) and political karate - so far, altogether, manifesting as a "horseless carriage" (Benjamin Bratton).
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