Discussion with REMAP... of Physicality versus Temporalness

The discussion with Jeff and Fabian, while highly engaging and encouraging, raised several important issues which I will ponder over throughout the course of the thesis.

The primary issue of contention dealt with the dialectically-opposing nature of the park being underground versus it being left, as far as possible, physically unmolested. While Jeff and Fabian acknowledged that the "underground rhizomes/wormholes" idea is conceptually (and hypothetically) feasible, a key concern is that the implementation of such a design would probably not go down well with the communities living in the park's vicinity, who had fought for the preservation of the park land.

Perhaps the point was missed - the idea of taking it underground, with mounds on the surface suggestive of "life" underground, was in itself a critique on the highly built-up proposals which any developer who took over the site (and whom the communities so vehemently fought against) would consider. (See below.)

One of the earlier (farcical) proposals (external to REMAP) of using the site as an "opportunity site", maximising out its real estate potential with apartments and industrial buildings.

Yet, on further thought, it is indeed reasonable that whatever intervention on the park should not be too harsh on the existing site. After all, the etherealness in the way(s) in which media is read, consumed and interpreted would call for architecture that is seemingly ethereal, not just in terms of, say, play with architectural form and skin, but also, in terms of temporalness and portability.

Thus, a step back has to be taken, and a look into how the information flow between networks - between people, between different states of media, and so on - can be mapped onto physical space. The beginnings of this idea were addressed in the intention to interpret each underground rhizome / tunnel as a categorical tag (analogous to a tag for a Youtube video), but these were not systematised at this stage, nor was the idea clearly demonstrated.

In the next few weeks, that is what I shall address, before turning my thoughts again back to architectural form and space. Relationships between various entities and influencing forces will be addressed; diagrams will be mapped out. Only after that do spatial relationships come into the picture.