SKY: In their grand masterplan schemes for the world, architects seem to find the ‘final solution’ to all possible situations. SMITHSON: They don’t take those things into account. Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics of entrophic change. SMITHSON: [...]There is an association with architecture and economics, and it seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way. They never seem to allow for any kind of relationship outside of their grand plan. [...] And then suddenly they find themselves within a range of desolation and wonder how they got there. So it’s rather static way of looking at things. I don’t think things go in cycles. I think things just change from one situation to the next, there’s really no return.
— ‘Entropy Made Visible’ (1973) Alison Sky, interview with Robert Smithson
aesthetics of entropy | at the concrete plant by karianne halse
Landscape processes
approaching architectural conditions
1 Prelude
The landscape Processes Conditions
The anthropogenic landscape we inhabit consists of different layers, traces, geological and man-made mechanisms and processes. Despite the fact that we experience it as immutable, the land we inhabit is inherently unstable. Natural actions like active tectonic plates and geological processes of natural agents such as air, water and the sun are, together with human activities like industry, cultivation and consumption of land, triggers of a constant modification of the landscape. The inevitable processes of entropy 1 , decay and chronotopic changes initiates the setting for this narrative, which seeks to explore the relationship between a dynamic landscape and the creation of process architecture . The intention is to explore a way of comprehending the processes and forces of the landscape as an operational field, and use the transformational potential to generate architecture as conditions of mutual impact and interdependence on the landscape. Entropy was a loaded term in the American land art artist Robert Smithson’s vocabulary: ‘it customarily means decreasing organisation and, along with that, loss of distinctiveness’. Basically, Smithson’s idea of entropy was concerned not only with the deterioration of order, though he observed it avidly, but rather with the clash of uncoordinated orders. Examples of entropy range from minor changes over a long period of time, such as increasing vegetation and sand displacement, to enormous destructions such as eroding coastlines, natural catastrophes and human devastations. The impact and speed of entropy may be generated at various paces creating varying characteristics, but it is always an irreversible process.
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Architecture as conditions
In the field of architecture, there is a common fear of unplanned changes caused by time; our work exists in its ideal condition the moment it is constructed – then the struggle of keeping it in a fixed state begins – a fight against different weather phenomena, decay, growth of weeds and daily wear and tear caused by users. There is a tendency to rather work against the landscape and the processes, restricting both the site and architecture within fixed frames, instead of focusing on the potentials of this transformation. By taking these matters into account, a new approach of possible aesthetic, functional and spatial qualities within architecture is conceived.
1 Entropy: the second law of thermodynamics – nature tends from a distinguishable order to a disorder in closed systems, leading to a state where all the differences are indistinguishable. This loss of energy can be seen as decay and deterioration
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