We architects call this exercise "programming" the space, and to me this is one of the most interesting – and sadly occasionally neglected – parts of architecture. Formal experimentation can be interesting and fruitful, but I'm more concerned with what goes on inside of the space and how it functions (or, again in architecture speak, how it "performs") than what it looks like.
This is in a way where architects can have a real impact over and above the relatively simple act of giving form to our built environment. This is where we can promote new ways of living and thinking and acting together as a species. To me it seems clear that the closer people live to each other, the more positive synergies are created. The city is thus the starting point for most of my thinking on architecture and how architecture can be made a better and more efficient support structure for moving us forward, and it's interesting to note that three of the four images above seem to present a non-urban (anti-urban?) proposition.
1) British countryside in the rain
So. Being me I have to challenge this. The first image shows a space that looks like a sole pavilion, without walls and open to the environment, placed next to a road in what is defined as the British countryside. That's a fairly general site: are we talking about the low, rolling landscape of the east and south, or the hills and mountains to the west and north? Judging from the image, I'm going to go with the former. The pavilion seems to be roughly two to three meters square, and three to four meters tall. It's raining. People are travelling down the road, on their way from A to B and back again. They stop. They park their car and walk over to the pavilion. And then... what?
You're already sheltered in the car, so a simple shelter wouldn't really cut it. Is it a water station that allows you to fill your bottles if you've run out of water? Possibly, but that seems a little simple. If you're going from London to Devon, say, there will be plenty of opportunities to do that along the way, and the distances are quite short as well.
No, I think it's about something else. Something stranger, something less obvious, something more beautiful. It's a celebration of something. A celebration of water. A built celebration of the water cycle, the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the surface of the Earth. An architectural celebration of the state change – from liquid to vapour to ice, and back – that makes up the hydrological cycle. It's "in the rain," but clearly, it can't be perpetually in the rain. Or can it? Maybe it's a weather station of sorts, a nodal point inside a network that have been devised to create its own weather. In this case, its own rain. Maybe it's a rain pavilion, a scientific echo of the rain dances of previous times and tribes? And if it's part of a network, it's part of something bigger, the same way buildings are often part of a city. Maybe there is more to this image than what we see, maybe this is just a corner of a gigantic city of similar structures, the corner of the skyline of a weather-making city, distributed across the landscape, slowly turning it into something more interesting for the promotion of human values and interactions?
How can this little tent create its own weather? Or at least its own rain? The traditional way would be through some kind of cloud seeding, maybe with silver iodide and solid carbon dioxide. Or maybe liquid propane. Or salt. Either way, if we're on the ground, we need some kind of ground generator.
But that generator could perhaps be quite cutting edge. In 2010, researchers from the University of Geneva tested an electronic mechanism for seeding clouds by directing infrared laser pulses to the air over Berlin. The idea was that the pulses would encourage atmospheric sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioide to form particles that would become and act as seeds that make it rain. New Scientist magazine reported that the laser did generate small clouds on demand.
The efficiency is "controversial" said Jerome Kasparian at the University of Geneva, but I say that's good enough for us in the speculative realm that we're now entering. So rather than sprinkling loads of chemicals into the atmosphere and hope for the best, we're using this tent as an on-demand shelter for firing laser beams at clouds and produce rain. Once it starts raining, the tent doubles as a collection and purification device for the water produced.
The tent structure holds a laser that's free to operate for motorists driving by. The laser fires extremely short pulses of infrared laser light into a chamber of water-saturated air at -24°C. Linear clouds are formed, like miniature airplane contrails.
The laser pulses strip electrons from atoms in the air, which forms hydroxyl radicals that convert sulphur and nitrogen dioxides in the air into paritcles tha act as seeds. Each laser pulse "packs a 220-millijoule punch into just 60 femtoseconds," says Kasparian, an intensity "equivalent to the power of 1,000 power plants". Who would have thought when first looking at that tent, and who would have thought the government would put that kind of power in the hands of you and me?
The only thing that is clear is that it works. You can see that in the picture. There we have the tent. It's raining. And someone clearly just stepped out of the picture, away from the laser gun, to fetch a bottle into which (s)he will pour lovely, bamboo-purified water that has been caught in the pure organic cotton roof.
2) Sheffield Botanical Gardens
The second image shows a similar (the same?) pavilion placed outside the Sheffield Botanical Gardens. I've only visited those once, and only for a very brief stroll on my way to giving a lecture. What I do know about the gardens is that they hold something like 5,000 species of plants, and that they're free to enter. So what does this piece of architecture do, standing about outside it?
Maybe it's a testing station for the plants. Maybe it's a scientific instrument, with which we can test the water-generating and -purifying credentials of the technology you're proposing. Maybe some of those 5,000 plant species are brought out from the gardens and into this canopy-like space, to see how they interact with the bamboo and the cotton? Maybe there are highly specialised scientists working 24/7 to try and figure out how some of these plants might combine with the architecture itself to create a mobile building that can help people sustain life in difficult environments? Maybe it's a research site for the creation of greenhouse tents, which can be pitched as the starting point for an entire permacultural society in remote regions of the planet? Maybe, despite looking quite rural, it is actually the starting point for the building of future cities, based on the purification of water, one of our (if not the) most important commodities?
3) North Down Campsite Devon
The third image shows another tent – and this time I think it actually is a tent – on a campsite in Devon. This seems like a highly fitting site, seeing that you're proposing a building made from fabric over a frame of poles, which is what a tent is. Another thing a tent might be is the home of a nomadic person, a temporary shelter, and what it might at first sight look to be here: a structure for recreational camping.
But hang on. Something is wrong with the scale here. The tent looks bigger than the other tents in the background. It's hardly a bivouac structure for a single person. It's not a backpacking device for a water lover. Is it a circus tent? No, it doesn't quite have the stripy, colourful cheerfulness of that. It's more serious. Like a... like a... military tent. The water-catching devices also makes it look a little like it's camouflaged. So we have a military tent that collects water. Who put it there? Maybe no one lives in it? (Side note: would that turn it into something that isn't architecture or not?) Maybe it was placed there in secret, to collect water, test the purification powers of the bamboo technology, and eventually report back on the findings so as to facilitate a future invasion? Maybe it's the starting point of a planned capital, the infant city in its field condition, before the decision has even been made that this is where the city will rise?
4) London City Centre in the Rain
The fourth image shows the structure against an inner-city London backdrop. It looks to be the size of about four London phone boxes. It's prominent position suggests it's been put there with some kind of admission. It was probably paid for by someone. It has a sponsor. Who would sponsor it? Maybe a... water company? Maybe it's the latest marketing ploy, a strategy dreamt up by some advertising agency: DRINK LONDON WATER! No more Evian, no more thousand-year springs, just properly filtered water from the Big Smoke. Someone probably operates the structure for bypassers, fills bottle after bottle with filtered London water, opens and closes the little "mouths" on the interior and exterior of the fabric, checks that the water flows the way it should across the surface.
How many of these are there out there? One? A hundred? Thousands? I think the latter. I think they are a worldwide phenomenon. I think they exist not only in London, but in other cities as well. DRINK TOKYO WATER! DRINK VENICE WATER! DRINK CHERNOBYL WATER! On each corner in every city, these strange little tents pop up, allowing people to get purified city water straight from the skies. Bamboo is cheap and renewable, we get rid of a massive mountain of plastic bottles, and we put to use water that would otherwise just be lost or simply returned as ground water. We slow down the hydrological cycle a little, allow for a little human intervention, just as is always the case when we turn natural resources into commodities. The water tent becomes a more obvious and direct alternative to some thousand-year-old spring in rural France, from which water is shipped by truck or lorry in highly unsustainable ways. It's architecture as a celebration of local water production, architecture at the very intersection of the sky and the street – a new definition of "horizon," perhaps.
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