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Repository of the Eternal Now

Part 2 Project 2011
Robert Ware
Royal College of Art | UK
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. No one can serve two masters.
You cannot serve God and Mammon.” – Gospel of Matthew

The City of London’s security is obsolete. Terrorism is evolving. Cyberattacks threaten increasingly vulnerable digital data whilst technologies dictate that we continually rely on its ubiquity. The country’s economy thrives off global trade establishing the London Stock Exchange as a principal terrorist target. The Church of England invests £4.5 billion as donations from churchgoers decline, so an interdependent solution uses new technologies to 3-dimensionally print the volatile, digital stock market data in stone in a perverse regression, providing a prophylaxis to modern terror and bestowing mutual longevity upon both the church and the economy. My addition to St. Paul’s Cathedral celebrates the synthesis of religion and finance, continuously building itself in real-time using data from the 41 stock market industry sectors, physically archiving the data and storing it in towers which grow in relation to the sector’s success. The repository fulfils Wren’s unaccomplished ambition for St. Paul’s, incorporating a stark, securocratic exterior with a dynamic interior richly adorned with intertwining iconographies. The regressive notion of archiving data physically was ironically driven by technology. My development of an iphone app which dealt with personal security led to the realisation that our physical surroundings are now at less risk than our virtual world. My subsequent 2D data printer was made from recycled printer parts and open source Arduino technology which I used to write a code that could simultaneously draw data from the internet in real-time using just a pen. To test the feasibility of replicating this 3-dimensionally I built a homemade 3D printer from scratch, again utilising open source technologies. The affordability and accessibility of the rapid prototyper demonstrates the ever-increasing accessibility of 3D printing and its potential application on an architectural scale.

Robert Ware

Tutor(s)
Mr Roberto Bottazzi
2011
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