We are the new explorers, registering the ground afresh.
We the transcribers of its strange histories,
those who listen for its peculiar resonances,
the keepers of its countless time,
cartographers of its unholy dreams.

i) The Sturgeon
Underneath the Magnetic South Pole, occupying a void carved out specifically for the purpose, is a frozen petrified sturgeon. The story of the Sturgeon and how it became the signifier of such a point in the landscape matters less than the fact that it exists. It marks the mathematically precise polar location, one of the two most significant feats of adventure and discovery on the face of the earth. Where we would expect a flagpole - there is a frozen fish.
The flagpole was invented for the act of registration. It has been used to mark new discoveries, conquests and adventures where being the first there was important. It is specifically designed for the purpose of claiming victory and is expected at a moment such as this. A frozen fish is not.
But here it lies. There is an admirable deviance in the creative act itself of deciding to carve a sturgeon into a void to mark such a place. It is foreign to its location and yet brings its own unquestionable story into discussion - it is clear the fish did not arrive to the precise location of the South Pole unaided, but it acts as an unexpected spatial registration, inviting imagination and interpretation purely by its presence in an extreme and strange location.

ii) Snow Piece

Think that snow is falling.
Think that snow is falling everywhere
all the time.
When you talk with a person, think
That snow is falling between you and
on the person.
Stop conversing when you think the
person is covered by snow.

Yoko Ono - 1963 summer

iii) Tralfamadorian Literature
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim, a veteran of the second world war is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians; an alien species for whom time itself is a landscape which they observe every position of at once and are free to move across at will. They are everywhere in this landscape, or rather everywhere and everywhen in it. Their literature consists of books which have “no middle, no end, no causes… no effects, what they love in them are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.”
Consonantly, Robert Smithson writes of artworks which ‘compress a million years into a second’, a new alchemy; a means of persistent registration for a quantum age where it is understood that people, artefacts, very matter itself are but temporary bulwarks against entropy, destined to be lost to the eventual heat death of the cosmos (or, according to Vonnegut, the universe ending when a Tralfamadorian pilot accidentally blows it up). So it goes.
Both the Tralfamadorian novels and Smithson’s time concertinaed artworks are registrations of time and space, deliberate confections of chance synchronicities, harmonies and dissonances which, taken collectively form elegant haikus to the cosmos. It follows that any landscape may be considered as a near infinite palimpsest of improbable happenstance, chance confluences of matter, time, human agency – gestalt realms ripe for adventure; and that we may - according to our desires - register our own confections thereof, bury our own sturgeons within, that insodoing we might reveal new ways to build upon and remember them.

We are intrigued by the human desire for conquest, the search for an improbable and previously impossible relationship between man and ground. Architectural opportunity lies in the spatial idea of this relationship - how we discover adventures and how we mark their territory.

Keying off the disparate yet somehow harmonious connections suggested by the Sturgeon, Ono’s Snow Piece and Tralfamadorian literature, we chart a path towards an archaeology of future architectures that have an inexorable correlation with the terrain, finding new ground hidden in old landscapes.

This year we will create architecture as registrations which question the boundaries between space, ground and landscape; interventions borne of congruences, syncopations, alignments, dualities, ciphers and sequences across the vast stratification of place and people where strange and meaningful architectures coalesce. What discoveries can we draw from a stratified landscape, to be modulated, through our own selves, and refigured into architectural action?