MArch Architecture Unit 23
23.5 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
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Figs. 23.5 – 23.7 Greg Storrar, Y5, ‘The Hydrographer’s House’. The intrepid experimentalist relies on instruments to enable enhanced observation. These instruments are devices of the dramatic. They construct spaces within which the human observer can seamlessly move between scales, terrains, and time frames. In this experiment architecture, the body is a malleable territory, neither here nor there. The work develops through the design and fabrication of observational instruments. Early devices include a camera rig that compensates for the rotation of the earth, and an apparatus that captures time-jumps in large earthquakes. Emerging from these early fabrications, the Hydrographer’s House is an architectural proposition that explores the material and immaterial spaces of the experiment. The house exists
both upon the edge of a water tank in a subterranean laboratory, and on the edge of a cliff overlooking the boundless ocean. The architecture both contains, and is contained, by the experiment. The field is a synecdoche within the false field, built around the mechanical eyes of the camera and the gauge. The house is an elaborate construction of visual and performative similitude, enabling the displaced observer to inhabit the real ocean through the framed views of the staged experiment. The architecture that emerges is a composition of frames and allusions. It is strange and idiosyncratic, sensible and supersensible, real and hyperreal.
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