STUDIO OVERVIEW
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers
We inhabit at minimum three worlds as homo-sapiens. These three worlds are not isolated universes; they are realms or levels within the known universe. Their numbering reflects their temporal order within the known universe. Each succeeding realm is a product of developments within the preceding realm. World three, the orbis tertius, is not the platonic realm of fixed ideas, archetypes, or forms. It is the product of matter (orbis primus) and mind (orbis secondo), it corresponds to the current state of knowledge and culture, and is constantly being shaped and reshaped by the past, present and potential futures.
Our imaginations are shaped and shape the orbis tertius, and our buildings, cities and artifacts are in fact a witness to history, a record/recorder of history, made of history, and re-present history. Buildings and cities, like the people who make them, are repositories of history: made, unmade, remade, renovated, wrecked, repurposed. So, too, are drawings.
The work in this volume is based collecting things past and present, creating curiosity cabinets/"wunderkammern", and deploying them in the revolutionary drawings of the 18th century archaeologist & architect Giambattista Piranesi as permanent or temporary installations. In opposition to the orthodox methodologies of architectural design in which a physical site is appropriated and visceral things conceived and built, the drawings and collections produced in this volume are the architecture. My inverse approach, understood as part of the multiple world continuum, creates a freedom expression I loosely define as the “techno-imaginative”.
The collections fall into urban categories such as: Domus, Polis, Bibliotheca, Archive, Hortus, Civica, Columbaria, Prata, etc. where every thought produces a thing, but not everything has been thought.