CINEMATIC
LANDSCAPE
EXCHANGE
Title: On the Beach
Institute: Architectural Association
Studio: Experimental 7
Maintaining that the experience of time passing is fundamental to human existence, and therefore inseparable from architecture, EXP7 aims to create clearly-defined spatial arrangements that have the capacity to enrich the practice of everyday life. We are concerned with landscape – not with shallow generalisms of ‘nature’, but with the systems and processes that give rise to the organisation of an environment.
The Magnesian Limestone deposits on the Durham coast overlie rich seams of coal that are around 310 million years old. At Marsden Bay, these layers are revealed in coastal exposures that are at once effective sections of both the physical makeup of the surrounding landscape and of time, showing the history of the development of the land. Getting down through the limestone to the coal beneath is a task that has come to define the social development of the area, and the wider country, for the past 200 years. This process of extraction actively contributes to the formation of the landscape today and promises to shape the future. Such interventions are enacted by the human hand directly, where inland mining industries shift and rearrange vast swathes of the landscape, invite social and economic investment and consequentially result in urban expansion. Their impact is also felt indirectly, following decades of vastly-elevated carbon emissions, increased levels of coastal erosion and record weather events, all of which have contributed to the precariousness – and, in some instances, danger – of living in this region and others like it.
Our main tool is the use of film; not as a system of representation but rather as a method to observe, draw and re-sequence space in time. Within the conceptual and literal edge conditions of the Durham coast, we will extract poetic value from empirical observations and narrate space to formulate a cinematic architecture of the landscape.
Institute: Architectural Association
Studio: Experimental 7
Maintaining that the experience of time passing is fundamental to human existence, and therefore inseparable from architecture, EXP7 aims to create clearly-defined spatial arrangements that have the capacity to enrich the practice of everyday life. We are concerned with landscape – not with shallow generalisms of ‘nature’, but with the systems and processes that give rise to the organisation of an environment.
The Magnesian Limestone deposits on the Durham coast overlie rich seams of coal that are around 310 million years old. At Marsden Bay, these layers are revealed in coastal exposures that are at once effective sections of both the physical makeup of the surrounding landscape and of time, showing the history of the development of the land. Getting down through the limestone to the coal beneath is a task that has come to define the social development of the area, and the wider country, for the past 200 years. This process of extraction actively contributes to the formation of the landscape today and promises to shape the future. Such interventions are enacted by the human hand directly, where inland mining industries shift and rearrange vast swathes of the landscape, invite social and economic investment and consequentially result in urban expansion. Their impact is also felt indirectly, following decades of vastly-elevated carbon emissions, increased levels of coastal erosion and record weather events, all of which have contributed to the precariousness – and, in some instances, danger – of living in this region and others like it.
Our main tool is the use of film; not as a system of representation but rather as a method to observe, draw and re-sequence space in time. Within the conceptual and literal edge conditions of the Durham coast, we will extract poetic value from empirical observations and narrate space to formulate a cinematic architecture of the landscape.
