Nature does not make mistakes in the way we do. Nature’s mistakes are nature.
Could This Happen in Nature? explores mistakes and chance occurrences as productive forces. Like the coastal landscape it depicts, the work emerged through a process of continual alteration in which instability was used as a deliberate design tool.
The work is based on our drawing of the part of the beach that is continually washed by the waves, alternately becoming wet and dry as the water moves across the sand. It is an unstable place, constantly reshaped by interacting forces. We translated the drawing into a three-dimensional plywood relief in which light, shadow, material and traces of fabrication become entangled with the original subject.
The work can be read architecturally, geologically, biologically or territorially. Familiar forms such as seaweed, pebbles, a petri dish and architectural structures appear alongside abstract and unrecognizable elements. Each part can be perceived at several scales, from the microscopic to the landscape.
The ecological crisis cannot be understood as a series of isolated problems. It is cultural and aesthetic as well as economic and political. While our future depends on verifiable knowledge, we also need ways of engaging with what cannot be predicted or controlled. Through our work, we explore how architecture might manifest itself in a flooded world, leaving room for imagination, chance and error.
The relief is a provisional form for thinking about the complex and unpredictable future ahead. Architecture must operate within the world, not at a safe distance from it.
The project has been exhibited at Gallery Block in Stockholm, at 3DaysofDesign in Copenhagen, and at the Royal Danish Academy
