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Taking Time: [For] an Island of Reciprocity

Part 2 Project 2024
James Hepper
Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK
Tresse Island's undulating surface shifts amorphously, leached with contaminants, excluded to the periphery of the Venetian lagoon as a quarantine for contaminated waste dredged sediment.

Myopic and insidious our stories of modernity are written more truthfully in the land than in books, so what if we in return, listen to our landscapes? Steeped in the paradox of beauty and contamination, Tresse is an entangled vessel of material opportunity, biodiversity, and contaminated history alike. Allying with phyto-remedial plants, colours of contamination bloom in ash glazes, the architecture aiming to reveal as much as to remediate. Aligning construction with geological and biological timeframes, the project asks a broader question of how we might make-with, times and life forms outside of the human centric.

The project follows the reciprocal process of slip casting, analogous to the wider conditions of the lagoon, of extraction and deposition. It seeks to engage with soil as a dynamic and shifting system, inviting its messy and unpredictable properties and behaviours into the creative process.

Operating programmatically as a re-imagining of the Venetian Scuole, the schools undertake the slow process of earth building alongside the gradual remediation of the site.

James Hepper

Tutor(s)

Ms Elizabeth Dow

2024
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