unit-code
Embracing softness dismantles rigid dualistic thinking and traditional classifications, foregrounding the enacted performative, whereby generative cyclical processes are crucially facilitated. New modes of ambiguous living are generated while restoring common relationship with uncanny landscapes.
Ne(i)ther Regions seeks to restore Boston’s soft landscape history through an ongoing wide-scale salt marsh reclamation in Boston Harbour. Facilitated by cycles of infrastructural dredging, the newly formed natural reserve seeks to uncover renewed solidarity between land, water city, harbour community and marshland.
Just as the wetland enacts simultaneous processes of begetting and destroying, living and dying, the proposed architectural system is continually made and unmade, created and destroyed in cyclical processes of generative repetition between the performance of natural weathering and community maintenance and care. It invites the Boston community to engage with the crucially performative nature of the wetland, whereby its ambiguity no longer elicits Cartesian disgust but mutual pleasure amongst the soft practice of mending while inhabiting the city's landscape and seasons.
Through soft cycles of landscape movement, Boston Harbour becomes Boston Marsh as the islands are connected with each other and the city. The new marshland acts as a city-scale nature reserve enabling participation in Boston’s wetland history.
The cathartic processes of steaming, mud bathing and plunging speak directly toward the soft material processes of the marshland, thus establishing renewed solidarity between the local community and its swampy past.
Through the proposal of facilitative ghost construction, soft processes are supported and upheld as the tensile structure's rigidity provides stable support as an architectural undergarment.
Weathering processes degrade and tear holes into the woven facade which can be repaired or upgraded with patching techniques utilizing various mending practices. These cyclical processes repeat, thus generating new soft forms of inhabitation.