Sentient Rock

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Apostolos Despotidis, Octavian Mihai Gheorghiu, Hanjun Kim

Team Deeksha Basawaraj, Le Lyu, Ziwei Guo, Waner Zhou

Air is a fundamental element of our being, the most overlooked substance. The properties of gases are accompanied by direction and pressure. Before the emergence of human-developed construction technology, nature had its own construction systems in various aspects. This has been stretched out over an exhaustive timeline, sometimes, integrating with nature and adjusting to changes that came with natural activities.  

 SENTIENT ROCK is a design research project where the possibilities of using air as formwork, resulting in the landscape as the prototype, are explored. This project aims to propose a construction strategy that uses air as a medium to establish a dialogue with the existing landscape. Set in locations with particle materiality like interior and polar deserts, modularity becomes the strategy to develop a robotic system that uses inflation to generate voids, as an infrastructure, where air and wind become a medium of their control. The system utilizes the dialogue between agent and landscape to create a spatial organization strategy that is responsive to the ever-changing environment. It is an initiation of a living rock strategy as a conceptual apparatus with which we think of land formations. The project then continues to explore ways in which a sense of permanence and timelessness can be brought to these spaces by solidifying and shifting the states of the dynamic particle materiality. 

 SENTIENT ROCK ultimately proposes a construction method with nature as technology. Architecture is no longer a man-made environment, but a part of nature, which makes the architecture return to the essence of space and makes it a new prototypical natural landscape.