Studio Moments
Studio Moments
Entanglement
By harnessing the conditions of its landscape [Climatic Phenomena + Geological Formations], how can an architectural mechanism offer Gibraltarians and a relationship to place, emergent from the landscape itself. Locally harvesting a resource that would otherwise be externally sourced.
The condition this project addresses is one of estrangement, of a population separated from the landscape that defines their place. It is not a question of access. It is a question of what it means to belong to a place?At the same time, Gibraltar faces a vulnerability: its water supply depends on desalination infrastructure kept afloat by externally sourced energy, this external dependency is yet another trace of the territories colonial dependency one that severs its relationship to its own hydrological/ecological conditions. Conditions that represent one of the most consistent climactic resources in the western Mediterranean.
The relationship that we kept coming back to in our investigations is that between the Levante wind and the vertical eastern faces of the Rock. this condition results in humid air being forced upward along stone, if the opposing wind is cooler the Levant wind condenses into cloud precisely at the elevations where the site’s topography becomes most extreme and most abandoned. Our wind studies explored wind as movement, a force that interacts with elevation and face orientation. Distinguishing our intervention from other examples of fog collection infrastructure. It does not simply intercept moisture it is positioned and calibrated in response to a landscape and it’s motion. The spatial conditions this relationship begins to produce are defined by verticality, suspension, and threshold. Because the site resists conventional occupation the architectural response must be one that works with lightweight assemblies anchored to the Rock’s geological surfaces rather than imposed upon them. The civic role emerging from this work is one of threshold-making. The Nature Reserve boundary currently marks a limit of belonging, a line beyond which the Rock belongs to history and tourism rather than to the people who live beneath it.