Structure 11/12

Iceland, 2018. Commissioned, Book Project & Art Installation 

with Marcel Jäggi, for Atelier Jäggi Leclair.

Project commissioned by the Random~Institute for the ‘Disappearing Museums’ Project. The curator asked 12 design practices to create a sketch over a landscape located in the Icelandic desert that the Random~Institute would then construct at a scale of 1:1. Rather than constructing a building, the curator proposes to erect a 'sketch' - schematic and incomplete - by using a material called ‘salt core,’ which dissolves with the rain. The project will first be published as a book in 2018, and built in 2019. 

‘Structure 11/12’ was created for its disappearance. Perched on an untouched cliff in the unhabitated Icelandic highlands, this structure confronts assumptions about architecture’s relationship with time, function, environment, and politics. Politics in architecture concerns the relationship between the object and anyone affected by it. But who will be affected by this disintegrating museum, never to be used, never to be inhabited, far removed from human settlements and built out of salt? Fishermen? Maybe. Animals? Maybe too! Or perhaps the crew that will be tasked to remove its residues, and the vegetal life vulnerable to sudden pH changes caused by heavy walls of salt melting away. Thinking through a political lens, Structure 11/12 was created primarily with its afterlife in mind. As the wet wind and frigid rain fracture its longest and most fragile stilt, the building collapses into the deep crevice of the rock formation, before slowly returning salt to water leaving the site untouched as if the building never was.