Listing to Port

We, the undersigned, having experienced the ebb and flow of life, believe that the architectural disciplines have for too long set store in a notion of permanence that is at best optimistic, and at worst harmful. We therefore humbly therefore present six proposals for a more transient architecture.

1. We propose a tower whose structure is partially supported by a colonnade around the perimeter; the columns themselves being discontinuous, with a gap of perhaps a metre and a half between the base and a suitably-cushioned upper portion. As built, the tower is unstable; to continue to exist without developing the most alarming cracks, each pillar must be supported by willing human volunteers, rather like live caryatids. The inhabitants of the building take it in turns to hold their home up; they are as a consequence always aware of their existence depending on the hard work of others.
As a variation, the inhabitants of the building do not provide the support themselves, but rather donate into a pot of money which anyone may win by participating in a kind of complicated tombola. The queue for the tombola winds round and supports the colonnade, holding up the building. Should the queue become short enough that part of the building is unsupported, the residents must donate more money in the hope of increasing demand. Residence in the building is a kind of status symbol, being representative of unlimited wealth.

2. A city that is made of a regular grid structure of open cubes, three metres on a side and ten cubes high, the struts of the grid being composed of some anonymous metal with plenty of attachment points. Residents may rent any given set of cubes for a period of a month only, and bring their own walls and furniture. The existence of continuous roads is a matter of common agreement and their straightness a measure of the amount of social cohesion in the city at any given time.    

3. We consider buildings these days to be maintained by a perpetual input of energy, though that energy is invisible; heating and electricity and somesuch. Therefore we propose to make the implicit explicit in the form of a perpetual motion tower, rather like an inhabited fairground ride. The tower resembles a spinning mushroom. The rate of spin we choose after careful experiments in what can be tolerated by its inhabitants, who are astronauts, athletes and the like who may benefit somehow from the constant centrifugal forces. They live rent-free and suffer the constant admiration of those who live underneath. The centrifugal forces are also necessary to keep the building together. If it were to stop, it would disintegrate. There is a substantial generator facility to guard against power cuts.

4. Observing ancient cities whose new buildings are built with the thousand-year remnants of the old, we propose a more dynamic variant. A city is built on a vast silty plain, criss-crossed with slow rivers. Initially, its honey-coloured stone is quarried from a great cliff at the edge of the plain. Once the city is well-established, a line is drawn at the base of the cliff. Every year, the line is moved ten metres further out from the cliff edge. All buildings that fall behind the line must be demolished. The stone is passed to masons, who may use it for building anew on the other side of the city - unless the city, in its slow march across the plain, has encountered a river, in which case the stone is used for building bridges. The city thus spends its years in constant metamorphosis. How changed it must be when, thousands of years hence, it reaches the sea! And will it be willing then to drown?

5. We conceive of an apartment building in the form of a great wheel or machine. Every few days, we approach the iron gears at the building’s core and give them some number of cranks. The apartments move on well-oiled tracks; here, there and everywhere. And the doors are unmarked! What chaos, then, when the residents come home from work and have to find their home once again. Who has left their door open, which key fits which lock, and whose couch to sleep on or bed to share if the correct apartment cannot be found before nightfall? And who has ended up as the penthouse, and who as the damp basement? Let us not dwell on those who were in the corridors and stairwells when the gears turned. No good will come of that.

6. Having come to terms with death, we choose to view time as a dimension in which we happen to be occupying a given location, rather than a march to an inevitable end. Our dispassionate wish then is that when we happen to occupy the furthest-along point in our time domain it have a good view and the makings of an interesting tale. And we are fortunate in that Nature is generous with spectacle! Thus we court transience in geography. We build only on the most exciting fault lines, the most piquantly tottering volcanic stacks. Nothing infuriates us like a solid foundation. Our apses span chasms, our arcades are founded on quicksand and timid masons gape at our tottering cloisters. Our fondest wish is that future generations find nothing of us in dry bones and pottery shards, nothing in tablets, no anklets, no urns and no stale mercantile notes, nothing, nothing, nothing but a raging torrent of myth and story and spectacle.

(there are no signatures)