Posts tagged Nicholas Szczepaniak
Nicholas Szczepaniak – A Defensive Architecture
Nicholas Szczepaniak will recieve the RIBA Silver Medal next month for his extraordinary graduate project “A Defensive Architecture”. I am delighted to be the first person to be publishing his work in my recently release book “Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands“. Nick’s work really is out on the hinterlands, a landscape plighted by climate change and rising water levels, social order breaks down, resources become rationed and public space becomes further militarised to maintain social order. Set in the Blackwater Estuary, Essex, his allegorical and provocative defensive architectures envisage the construction of a set of austere coastal defence towers that perform multiple functions within this dystopian future.
The militarised towers are alive — breathing, creaking, groaning, sweating and crying when stressed. Airbags on the face of the towers expand and contract, while hundreds of tensile trunks are sporadically activated, casting water onto the heated facades producing steam. An empty watchtower at the top of each tower gives the impression that the fragile landscape below is being constantly surveyed.
