Superscape GEOFF MANAUGH: I first became aware of your work in 2006, when the Augmented Landscapes pamphlet came out. Can we go back to that pamphlet briefly and discuss some of the broader themes it explored— including active landscapes, mechanical architectures, visual scenography, and so forth? What about those particular themes still propels your design work today? MARK SMOUT: Broadly speaking, as the title suggests, the pamphlet is about augmenting landscapes: pursuing more of a positive and symbiotic relationship between architecture and landscape, and looking at how that might generate a more proactive or productive form of architecture. An example of that, I suppose, would be the “Ballistic Instruments” project. Had we not squeezed that into the Pamphlet when we did—had we not tied it off for publication at that point in time—we probably wouldn’t have finished it in the same way. We would have followed it through a bit more, and made a series of projectile devices, and we’d be launching instruments out in the middle of the Norfolk coast right now—I’d probably still be doing it! [laughs] It would have been a five-year project.
LAURA ALLEN: And it was about the horizon. It was about the horizon and architecture— about the place of the horizon in architecture. We were looking at the way that objects fit into or stand against the horizon, to see how architecture could function differently in that visual context. That then became a springboard for the later “Retreating Village” project, in that we went on to examine how things like the facades of buildings might work to break up the horizon visually with a disruptive pattern
M.S.
In their book Augmented Landscapes, Mark Smout and Laura Allen write that, for “Ballistic Instruments,” pictured here, “a split-second spatial event is triggered which reveals the nature of the sites which [these instruments] temporarily occupy.”
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