At a time when more people are living in cities that are growing ever higher, and when the scale of buildings can resemble vast geologic, landscape formations, this book proposes ideas from the natural world as a means to explore these conditions. If modernity unleashed social, economic and technological forces capable of destabilising established understandings of āhomeā and ānatureā, at the same time it provided the conceptual apparatus to reinvent them. Far from leaving these disturbed categories in ruins, modernity fostered the means by which alienation and absence might become catalysts for change.
Choosing to study the emblematic figure of the mountain, this book revisits the ideas of ācontextā and āscaleā as formed in natural architecture, as conquered through geographical imagination and human endeavour, and as expressed through architectural practices related to the built environment. Acknowledging the presence of mountains in the natural landscape and architecture as proto-megastructures, the book suggests their reciprocal investigation.
The book is an output of a three-year research project entitled āMountains and Megastructuresā held by members of the Architectural Research Collaborative (ARC) of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle upon Tyne.1 This study extended and further developed the theme of human endeavour through installation, performance, film and urban walks as well as talks, and engaged a yet wider circle of contributors. As the project has expanded and attracted attention and interest, the network of researchers engaging with our themes has extended, prompting us to develop this publication that can involve this now national and international group of contributors and open up these crucial debates and approaches to a yet wider audience.
In seeking to pursue an examination of mountains and megastructures as interrelated phenomena, this volume draws on the multidisciplinary nature of architectural research. Mountains and megastructures are not understood as architectures per se, but rather the multidisciplinarity of architectural research enables a full range of parameters (politics, urbanism, society, theology, literature/fiction, metaphysics, curating and so forth) to be brought into play towards a multilayered critical topography. Through historical, speculative, literary, performative, geographic, visual, social and participatory investigations, the volume aims to contribute to the wider academic discourse on cultural and political landscapes and to demonstrate the potential of architectural research in its broadest sense.
As the subject of architectural research, the natural landscape is examined in this book as organically intertwined with the built environment. Neil Burford and Christos Kakalis suggest in their chapter the following definition of what we mean by the natural landscape and the built environment:
By natural infrastructures we mean all the natural formations and amalgamations of phenomena and geological conditions that organically contribute to the life of mountainous ecosystems, as part of a living ecological reality. By human infrastructures we mean all the humanly conceived and built facilities and systems that are structured to serve the movement of people ā¦ [which] are related to cultural, economic and geopolitical qualities of the Alpine geographies.
In this multi-scalar understanding of architecture, our combined explorations of natural mountains and manmade megastructures raise questions about measure and scale and our wider engagement with the world. This manifests itself in this book in diverse ways including: the experiential (inhabitation, climbing, shelter, construction); the intellectual (religious connotations, mythical associations, political reflections); the representational (cartographies, experimental/futuristic explorations) and, the structural (materialisation of projects such as social housing complexes and urban plans).
In considering the shared qualities of mountains as naturally formed landscapes, and of megastructures as manmade landscapes, this volume seeks to unravel how each can be understood as open systems of complex networks of human, natural and artificial relationships. By looking at mountains and megastructures in an interchangeable way, therefore, the book negotiates the fixed boundaries of natural and artificial worlds, to suggest a more complicated relationship between landscape and architecture. We argue there is a fundamental need to shift the relationship between people, place and environment. What is required is an ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture and landscape, and an entangled network of relations. Urban, colonialist, fictional, rural and historical landscapes are interwoven into this fabric that also involves discontinuities, tensions and conflicts as parts of a system that is never linear, but rather fluid and organic and always driven by human endeavor. The latter becomes the catalyst and common background of the explorations of this volume.
In the context of global environmental issues such as overpopulation, accelerating greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, pollution of the oceans, etc., the āanthropoceneā asks us to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time, altering significantly the way that many once familiar issues appear. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin describe the āanthropoceneā, where the natural environment amalgamates with cultural, social and technological endeavors to follow the accelerating dynamics of a changing topography:
To a large extent the future of the only place where life is known to exist is being determined by the actions of humans. Yet, the power that humans wield is unlike any other force of nature, because it is reflexive and therefore can be used, withdrawn or modified. More widespread recognition that human actions are driving far-reaching changes to the life-supporting infrastructure of Earth may well have increasing philosophical, social, economic and political implications over the coming decades.2
Like Chris French and Maria Mitsoula writing in this book, we argue that debates as to when the anthropocene as a geological epoch began, should not only centre on periods of great environmental changes (as marked, for example, by the impact of the Industrial Revolution), but should also be based on those changes in the representational regime that support a view of the world that primarily enables the domination of anthropos (Ī¬Ī½ĪøĻĻĻĪæĻ, meaning person).
However rather than seeing the āanthropoceneā as a totalizing, universalising, overarching āstate of beingā, we view it more critically as it relates to a more fractured, heterogeneous world, informed by issues of cultural identity and politics. Revisiting architectural phenomenological and hermeneutical interpretation of human agency in the understanding of the (built and unbuilt) landscape, one aim of this book also involves a more critically defined position of architecture in the field of anthropocene studies, than has been addressed up to the present moment.3
In many ways, mountains have been seen by philosophers, sociologists, and architects as pristine examples of nature, āa last refuge from an urban culture now perceived as rampant and the undoing of the very notion of refuge, the experience of the high mountains takes on all the doubleness of the modern conditionā.4 Mountains have also usually been considered as static emblematic figures in the natural landscape calling for their mythicisation in diverse cultures and societies. More recently, approaches in geography and cultural studies have challenged these static qualities suggesting moving characteristics through the lens of geological changes, human and natural performance or even mapping as well as artistic and architectural works:
The landscape is something living, and changing through the perception of the individual; it is the tension between an object being experienced and the subject experiencing the object through his/her senses. This multi-sensory condition is experienced to a great extent (and almost to its limits) in the case of the mountains that from distant, emblematic natural elements become the foldings of the earthās skin as perceived by the mountaineer climbing up to them, the thinker that imagines them, the reader that interprets them, the artist or the architect that depict them.5
Is there a relationship between ideas of modernity as āmoral high groundā, and the idealised view of the mountain? Have mountains shaped discussions in modern architecture? Are mountains seen as a space for purifying the āselfā, in much the same way that modernism was seen as a way of purifying architecture? What place does āthe socialā play in the formation of landscape and architecture? How might this inform an alternative or parallel history of modern architecture?
Jonathan Hill in this book suggests that the roots of (mountain) megastructures stretch back to the Athenian Acropolis begun around 450 BC. Since the 1960s, the emergence of megastructures has introduced fields of complex networks of relationships that offer dynamic models to explore modern and contemporary landscapes. While we argue that megastructures are heavily dominated by the politics of class, gender, resistance and revolution, they are also organisms of a quasi-independent status; they are worlds within the world that suggest a new order, going beyond the limits of the past and the present and projecting to the future. Megastructures have so often been seen as the culmination of human desires to technically control and contain environments, and like mountains are often seen as an unchanging typology. Just as mountains became a place for people (largely white male explorers) to gaze down on the world below, do megastructures offer the same world view? In a fragmented world, is the megastructure a last desperate plea for a return to a more stratified and totalizing landscape? Infrastructural projects, vertical megastructures, technological and structural innovations reflect complex social, political and financial relationships that are integrated into the moving nature of the landscape.6
The book is structured into three sections: āFraming Mountains/Megastructuresā, āMountainsā and āMegastructuresā. Each section begins with a more visual exploration of its theme, enabling a more experiential and immediate encounter with the resemblance and reciprocity of built and natural landscapes, than can be provided by the purely textual. Following these visual-text essays, a series of chapters seek to unfold the dynamic of the combined investigation of human and natural environments.
In Framing Mountains/Megastructures the authors explore and define the main themes of the book: the interconnectedness of the ānaturalā and ābuiltā environments; the social aspects of landscape and architecture that are rendered visible when they are thought together; and, the necessity of investigating the ālarge scaleā, particularly within the context of the anthropocene. In doing so the book sets out alternative ideas of landscape and architecture, which are largely missing from their histories and is one of the first to set out a more critically defined position for architecture within the field of the Anthropocene.
Through three theoretical design proposals Christos Kakalis explores the northern border of Mount Athos as a hybrid between a border and boundary. Suggesting three megastructures along the border, he counter-points the 2033 metres high mountain that has been an important point of reference in religious and socio-political international landscapes. Following this creative practice unfolding of the examined theme, Ian Thompson breaks down the distinction between exploration in the natural wildernesses of the Alps and in urban areas and considers the shift from picturesque values in photography to the valorisation of kinetic, embodied photographic practices. Through the housebuilding endeavours of John Ruskin and John Tyndall in the Alps, and present-day field trips, Polly Gould furthers the argument of this section using the same mountainous geographies as Thompson. Gould says that what is required is an ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture and atmospheres. She argues that rather than understanding a building as a discrete unit made up of distinct materials, what is required is a āCritical Zone understandingā, which recognises the dynamic interconnectedness of rock and air, of architecture and atmosphere, as well as human scales of making and meaning.
Drawing primarily on the work of Gaston Bachelard, Sigmund Freud, James J. Gibson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Kati Blom investigates the experiential connections between verticality, ānegative affordanceā, and the horrors of modern life. Indeed, for Blom, the modern-day city of megastructures and glass facades is a barren urban landscape. By contrast, Bachelardās intimate daydreaming resides in timeless, or resting images of nooks and corners. We need to feel sheltered in order to express freedom of movement in cities, structures and buildings. Blom argues that in buildings, āthe natural tendency is to enter, dwell, habit or live, not to pass by, lose, get lost, miss or ignoreā. These latter notions are prevalent in modern city environments, particularly in tall buildings with glazed walls.
Finally, through an exploration of the Rothes and Newton Grange collieries in Scotland, a reading of Voltaireās Micromegas, written in 1752, and Daniel Libeskindās drawn series of the same name produced in 1979, Chris French and Maria Mitsoula close this first section by highlighting questions of measure and scale, in the critical reframing of the notion of the anthropocene. By a closer look at a number of buildings for various collieries in Scotland, designed by Egon Riss between 1947 and 1964, the authors argue that a āthickened architectural realmā extends from the subterranean world below, drawing the seam to the surface, and āsinkingā the spaces of āmanā. These projects, consistent in material and style, can be read as a single megastructure giving anthropocentric measure to a vast landscape. This megastructure reflects Libeskindās Micromegas as a critique of an architecture that offers only rational and instrumental ways of measuring our world, our relationships to ground (above and below), to geology and to geometry. At the very least, by taking us away from the ground, by making infinity thinkable, Libeskindās drawings disavow the notion of a ācentreā, of an āeverythingā and of a ānowā that could belong to āmanā.
The section on mountains investigates them both as orientating landmarks and fields of contestation, which give tangible form and presence to the complexity of that landscape and its heterogenous character, in regions around the world including Tasmania, Japan, the Himalayas and the Alps.
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