Very Heavy. Very Light. Some designs for Stone, Steel and Glass in the Desert
Stone, Steel and Glass, Designs by Gokhan Karakus
I had a long self brainstorming design session this weekend and came up the above designs. I was initially interested in combining the heaviness of stone with the lightness of steel and glass as an architectural effect. The renders in this gallery came up as architectural ideas of this effect as a moment. That is to say these are spatial moments as architectural propositions focused on the visual properties of these materials in the illusive and liquid optics of the desert. Why am I trying to combine stone, steel and glass in the desert setting? I'm interested in the precise rectangular geometries of steel and glass against the rough geological geometries of natural stone as a first step. Yet we also have the desert setting that gives interesting light and shadow effects that renders the material especially the glass surfaces as more natural despite being highly artificial. Remember there are no straight lines in nature! In this way nature degrades the glass surfaces rendering them liquid and amorphous. In this way, the combination of these organic and manmade geometries seen through the "lense" of the desert with the steel and glass as a lense itself is a doubling. A doubling of the idea of architecture and space through the nature of human perception and understanding of the physical, the spatial and the vapor.
To continue this argument based on material and optical flows I would also refer to Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux. In the fourteenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari develop a dichotomy between two kinds of space – the smooth and the striated. My designs attempt to create a hybrid space between the two as an architecture and space where heavy and light combine with the smooth and the striated. I'm trying to demarcate space via materials to emphasize the smoothness of the desert but also the opposite, the powerful orthogonal geometry of the steel and glass that can become viscous and spatial. My architectural images are themselves typical of the mirage of the desert using mirage in the architecture to generate a highly specific spatial and visual condition or event that I have tried to design. Lastly I can say this vision, the vision of the desert, of the mirage that breaks the dichotomies of hard and light, smooth and striated, mineral and light, I can reference the video artist Bill Viola's initial forays in video art from the 1979. Viola's series of images of the desert in Tunisia at the salt lake of Chott el Djerid, that has long occupied me are from his video Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat, 1979. Viola through the art of video creates a portrait of light and heat only possible the desert. My design idea is take this a step further to create an architecture that melds into this light and heat at the physical level.
Gökhan Karakuş 2023
