The project was designed in the frame of an urban-landscape competition to mitigate the impact of a new highway on the city`s periphery.
The aim is to create a device that can interact with the dynamic processes of the site, be self sufficient in terms of energy, bringing a ‘new ornamental view’ to the landscape. The site was thought as a field, so to be treated in that fashion.
‘The field describes a space of propagation, of effects. It contains no matter or potential points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relations of difference within fields of celerity, transmission or of careering points, in a word, what MInkowski called the world.’ Sanford Kwinter, 1986.
The project departs from the idea of reproducing a green plantation, an artificial grass plantation. One that is able to move, interacting with the external contextual forces.
Each artificial grass is built with a metal spring on its base, enabling an acrylic grass on top, to move according to the forces of the natural and artificial wind. This generates a changing pattern, a dynamic field in which its intensities are varying depending on the vectors and speeds of the winds coming either from the nature or from the wind produced by the highway traffic. Each grass has a different scale, responding to the distance to the highway. Allowing global differentiation through local ones.
At the base, next to each spring sits a mini solar panel, accumulating energy during the day, to be released at night. While the grass moves, the spring bends within a certain range, so at a specific angle, the spring makes contact with an electric sensor that opens a led light on and off gradually. Producing constantly evolving lightning patterns.
This is the result of a seminar developed at the MARQ Universidad Catolica de Chile during first semester 2008. We studied the potentials of self organized structures as architectonic components. Those geometries would have a high adaptive resilient capacity, driven by a physical transformation process -temperature, wind, humidity, sound, magnetism, etc..- The system [thought as a component propagation structure] would enable global variations triggered by local ones. Therefore, it would be conceived as an interconnected network.
Geo_Systems 