this page –
top: the profile of an aeolian dune
middle: the methodology: dune morphology formed by angles of repose, air direction, crests and slip faces is translated to the constraints of metal duct manufacturing. left is the aeolian plan, right the section. bottom: section of the dune ducts installed; a ventilation landscape
facing page –
dune ducts installed, and the reflected ceiling plan showing the installation in the gallery context.
Gabriel Fries-Briggs
dune ducts An assemblage of entities, ventilation threads together a social- ecological-technical system. The project here, Dune Ducts, is a narrative of air reflective of these systemic origins, linking comfort, mechanical ventilation, landforms, climate and daily experience. Installed in a gallery in Los Angeles, it adapts the industrial techniques of sheet metal fabrication to construct a ventilation landscape. It considers the sand dune as an example of air as built form: assembled by aeolian processes, these are forms outside the traditional built environment. The erosion, transportation and deposition of sediment by wind manufactures a common profile of a long shallow angle, or stoss , facing the wind, a crest, and steep lee side. Looking to geology and meteorology, this installation- as-building system overlays multiple categories and narratives of ventilation. Suspended in the ceiling plenum, the ducts-as-dunes act as a prosthetic device extending the existing diffusers. Air escapes at gaps or breaks in the dunes, injected across the space
in a distribution of small gusts. Expanded ventilation and its uneven release of air calls attention to a varied set of environmental conditions. Shifting expectations away from a uniform, idealised climate to one of difference makes the relationship between air quality and climate change less a demand for uniformity and its high environmental price, and more a specific response to a place and time. How we sense infrastructure visually, how we sense its presence in a space, landscape, or territory, how we sense its relationships to other forms, or how we sense the way it conditions us might heighten our awareness of its vitality. Exhibiting air brings it to the foreground of experience and makes visible its precondition for being. Air can be conditioned categorically as a symptom of global warming, a metric of comfort or discomfort, as central to health as is engineering or building science. Threading these readings together and putting them on display is one step in building new relationships to our life-supporting systems. p
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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