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Drafting & Re-Drafting: The Institute of an Account of the Mont-Saint-Michel Littoral Landscape

Part 2 Project 2022
Jonathan Pilosof
Amy Charlotte Drabble
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK
The Island Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel is seen as a tablature on which to witness, measure, appraise and strategize the temporal landscape of the vast Normandy coast bay in which it stands. The Institute poses architecture as a device for mapping and responding to the changes this fragile landscape of polders, dykes, saltmarsh and mudflats face in the context of climate change and rising sea levels.

Like cartographic devices set into a drafting table, a community of fine architectures take root within the granite grain of the abbey. They chart a performance of landscape- measuring; recalibrating the Mount to a new form of ritualized programme and routine. Each intervention meditates on a landscape of shifting cultural, economic and environmental character and significance. In so doing, they act out concerns that operate on a wider, global level.

Observing the way in which the extant commune clings onto the granite island-outcrop, the Institute is itself composed of hanging, towering, floating and anchored architectures that seek moorings within the thick walls of the Abbey. Anthracite steel keys into footholds - carved over centuries of built and destroyed sites - to suspend walls of finely milled oak that weather against the salt-air of the English Channel.

Jonathan Pilosof
Amy Charlotte Drabble

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2022
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