PHILIP BEESLEY ARCHITECT INC. Aurora. Royal Conservatory of Music (273 Bloor West).
The beautiful, tangled art installations that Philip Beesley and his team – which includes engineer Robert Gorbet and biologist Rachel Armstrong – create are also meditations on the future of architecture.
Instead of acting like a fortress or tomb designed to resist the forces of nature, a building might function, he suggests, as a third skin around our bodies, based on forms that want to lose energy and promote interaction, like those of sea urchins or dandelions.
In the visionary artist/architect’s studio near High Park, assistants adjust hanging prototypes and tweak computer renderings in preparation for his Nuit Blanche show Aurora.
Hylozoic Ground, their most recent in a series of installations named for hylozoism, the ancient idea that all material has life, is currently representing Canada at the Venice Architecture Biennale. It starts with a mesh made of acrylic chevrons clipped together into canopies and columns. The environment flexes and responds, using muscle wire that contracts like muscle protein and microprocessors that cause the installation to assemble and shift, like a coral reef or swarm of insects.
Protocell chemistry, based on simple reactions in living cells, forms a lymphatic system in interconnected flasks. Carbon in the form of limestone is precipitated from water trickling from the Venice lagoon, a process that might one day bolster the foundations of the sinking city.
But that’s just the technology. Beesley, his conversation as densely layered as his installations, describes in almost spiritual terms the emotions that the structures, with their caressing and swallowing movements, evoke.
“Hylozoic Ground has a toughness, but its delicacy sets up a very interesting reaction: people care about it they touch carefully. Its vulnerability brings out a quality of intimacy that is absolutely natural in a crowd.”
A quarter-million people, he says, visited versions in Linz and Mexico City, “so my cynicism about the brute force of crowds has really been challenged. It’s been very encouraging to see how empathy could be an innate quality rather than a higher one that has to be policed or encouraged consciously.
“We can look at collective feelings as full of fear, as in the obscene qualities of nationalism or group violence. But glimmers of sympathy and care can emerge. Hylozoic Ground tries to get at these qualities in primal ways by working with the insect-like bundles of sensations in our limbic brains, and then expands that out into a sense of exchanges in space, where the boundaries of what and who I am, the differences between me and an animal and a rock, become quite blurred.”
Photos of the work remind some people of the alien flora in Avatar, but Beesley’s quick to distance his work from “the top-down military project of James Cameron, because he attempts to swarm us with a sense of the majesty of his craft. We’re working in radically simple ways, as a kind of cottage industry, building things with packets of components made of the most modest building blocks.
“My hope is certainly to open a sense of the sublime, of vast immersive experience, but at the same time to foster a sense of ambivalence – and to foster agency in the relationship, as opposed to being consumed and manipulated.”
Some find the strangeness of the environment vaguely creepy.
“The touch and encounter of materials is very tentative and very raw. There’s some suffering embedded in it as well as some nurturing,” Beesley says. “Defensive details, hooks and claws and needles, can make the field quite tense and nervous, darkening the tone. It gives us a range from erotic floral attractions to, say, an octopus’s beak or a cat’s paw.”
I wonder if Beesley is working with biomimicry, the discipline seeking design solutions in nature profiled in NOW’s recent Green Issue.
“Our work does not imitate nature as such, but by going through many, many cycles of design – digital simulation, fabrication, prototyping, material testing – the forms that result, surprisingly, by lovely coincidence, have an awful lot to do with some forms offered us by natural evolution. For example, to produce the most unstable, trembling, fan-like, almost convulsive quality in an air-stirring element, we made a frond that produces helical chains of air convection, with feathery tines like a palm frond’s.”
Though he sees Aurora as a deliberate break with the Hylozoic series, it continues its goal of evoking questions about who we are and the boundaries between us.
“It’s an attempt to stand back and conceive of new qualities of space and technology. We’ll suspend a lightweight cloud of material in the Royal Conservatory, made of quite regular geometries, like a quilted surface. Veils of cables with small clusters of thousands of cells of feather-like mylar will hang in the space.
“An active, river-like curtain will use an algorithm that sets up chains of reactions with neighbouring cells, producing forms akin to single-celled organisms moving and interacting in a protoplasmic soup, expressed as flashes of light and vibrations.”
A layer of several hundred hovering glass vessels will hold a simple protocell formula of oil and vinegar with crystals growing in it.
“The huge, boiling cloud will be perturbed by a meshwork of sensors along its lower edge, so when you walk through, hanging smart cables fitted with microprocessors pick up your influence in ripples that spread out.
“It’s almost like Hylozoic Ground has had us deep underground in densely knotted, labyrinthine caves, and now we’re coming up for a breath of fresh air.
“A sense of touch and of sensitivity that will flicker through Aurora might invoke a silent and personal sense of who we are inside, what kind of bundle of identities each of us is, what the boundaries between us are,” Beesley adds. “I hope the Aurora project opens up these kinds of questions.”
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