CINEMATIC












LANDSCAPE












EXCHANGE













CINEMATIC

LANDSCAPE




EXCHANGE


Enter Apollo North
2024–2025 


Title: Enter Apollo North
Institute: Architectural Association
Studio: Intermediate 7


On a clear day, looking north from Compass Point, you can see almost all the antenna that belong to GCHQ’s listening station near Bude in Cornwall. From here, the things we can see – stark-white round structures quietly perched on the horizon – are a reminder of what is unseen. More than 30,000 kilometres of fibreoptic cable land on shore there, arranged in a cluster dubbed Apollo North. It is estimated that this beach is the through-point for 98% of the traffic on the Internet. 

The fact that these breathtaking cliffs, rolling hills and sandy beaches are a site of digital infrastructure, and therefore also a site of a major global security operation, underscores the counterintuitive logic of our seamless experience of digital technology. Fast and invisible communications through ‘cloud’ technologies require buildings that are enormous, heavy and slow: satellites, receivers, cables, server stations, administrative buildings, holding pens, aeroplanes, hangars, communication towers, landing strips, car parks and warehouses. Boundless digital experience is always located in the real world. Physical space is the beating heart behind the clusters of pixels in front of our eyes.
We will approach our site in Cornwall with an acute awareness that landscape has become a technological realm. Maintaining that the experience of duration is fundamental to human existence and is therefore inseparable from architecture, INTER7 uses the medium of film for its unique ability to capture and edit time, observe and interpret reality, suspend logic and resequence space. We are concerned with natural environments and the roles humans play within them. We are therefore interested in landscapes and the systems and processes that give rise to the organisation of an environment. We will learn to use film in order to articulate our understandings of the landscape by observing its phenomena and reading its geological, social and material histories, so that we can propose new time-sensitive spaces, narratives, structures and strategies. By translating film through tectonic and ephemeral models, and by directly intervening in the land, each student will develop highly individual methods to derive transcendent value from empirical observations and formulate a cinematic architecture of the landscape.