When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects

When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 2 of 17When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Interior PhotographyWhen the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 4 of 17When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 5 of 17When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - More Images+ 12

More SpecsLess Specs
When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 4 of 17
© Lance Gerber

Text description provided by the architects. We are interested in the possibility and impossibility of establishing physical ties with the geological fabric of AlUla. In our conviction, everything can always be re-examined and reinterpreted since the apparatus of the perceived environment cannot be measured, anticipated, controlled, or known entirely. We might start to perceive this connection through a material offering that traces and constructs human and non-human interactions between elements in the surrounding nature.

When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 7 of 17
© Lance Gerber
When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 16 of 17
Floor Plan
When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 9 of 17
© Lance Gerber

Through this work, we want to encourage speculation as a means of exploration and reflection to further develop and reshape our understanding of the ecological transition of the site and its physical geographies.

When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 6 of 17
© Lance Gerber
When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 15 of 17
Diagram

To establish this connection, we start to look freely at material gestures and found forms and let them perform as architecture. In this way, the work emerges by the dictations of the site itself and the engagement of its spectators and ​​ shift the emphasis from the qualities of the work to the aesthetic values of exchanges involved in the processes of investigation around the site itself. Thus, blurring lines between object and subject.

When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 10 of 17
© Laurian Ghinitoiu
When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 17 of 17
Sketch
When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 11 of 17
© Laurian Ghinitoiu

To further establish an understanding of subjectivity in relation to positionality, we reference Rosi Braidotti’s notion of the ‘nomadic subject’. In her writings, the nomad describes an epistemological condition, a kind of knowingness (or unknowingness) that refuses fixity, that allows us to think between or ‘as if’, to articulate another reality. These traces inform the pathway to the proposed work and prompt the discovery process of the larger site, playing an important role in creating new kinds of relationships between subject and object.

When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 2 of 17
© Lance Gerber

In essence, we want the work to remain interpretable as it originates from the found forms. This intervention would operate within an existing site to expose new life or identity through transformation. Based on a more poetic criteria of time, memory, materiality, and occupation, this form of intervention will operate to raise and intensify our awareness of the surrounding ecology and create a place of meaning and contemplation out of a careful reframing of the familiar.

When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects - Image 14 of 17
© Laurian Ghinitoiu

Project gallery

See allShow less

Project location

Address:AlUla, Saudi Arabia

Click to open map
Location to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.
About this office
Cite: "When the Earth Began to Look at Itself - Desert X Installation / Syn Architects" 01 May 2024. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1016132/when-the-earth-began-to-look-at-itself-desert-x-installation-syn-architects> ISSN 0719-8884

You've started following your first account!

Did you know?

You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.