Landing grounds: Archilab's Earth Buildings, radical experiments in land architecture.

ARCHILAB'S EARTH BUILDINGS, RADICAL EXPERIMENTS IN LAND ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Marie-Ange Brayer and Beatrice Simonot. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. [pounds sterling]24.95

Architecture has always had an interstitial quality, an ability to paper over society's fissures as well as that characteristic which Abbe Suger described as dwelling not entirely within the firmament of the heavens, nor the slime of the earth, but somewhere in between. Archilab's Earth Buildings gives this theme a particular contemporary twist, though Atelier Bow-Wow perhaps pinpoint the phenomenon with greater accuracy than the title. For them a 'refreshment area squeezed in under a little sports centre on a slope' is 'nonsensical yet full of joyous, spontaneous energy'; as Suger and many others realized, the zone between nature and artifice has rich pickings for creativity, but as the further reaches of bio-technology show, it's jolly hard to splice them together.

Editors Marie-Ange Brayer and Beatrice Simonot do not try to splice the work of their 30 chosen architects from Europe, the US and Asia together; they hope the affinities speak for themselves. Some, such as the Spanish group Actar Arquitectura or Field Operations from the US, more obviously work with the landscape metaphor of the title. Topography becomes the generating force of form. Others are more obviously urban, taking cues from the myriad reworkings of city planes: among these are Vicente Gaullart from Spain and Alain Renk from France. And a few consciously strive for the edge between town and city--with an elegant literalness in IaN's greening of a working class Roman suburb, or the metaphorical depth which Chora's Raoul Bunschoten finds in the analogy between the skin of the earth, and the urban surface.

With its variety and density the book itself is a metaphor for the processes it attempts to describe, making definition difficult and generalization almost impossible. At an impressionistic level though, two problems emerge. Drawing techniques and means of representation are remarkably consistent across the world and diversity of project; drawing on montage, and contrasting the seductive non-specificity of the model photograph or the frozen film frame with the chimeric accuracy of the digital image. Digital technology introduces the second problem; its ability to deal with the minute and microscopic easily leads to a blurring between artificial and natural processes, of which Bunschoten is a prime example: even if they follow the same patterns, their driving dynamics might be very different. And especially considering that so many of the contributors have some allegiance to the fox-and-crow dominated wasteland which passes for landscape in the Paris: Frankfurt: Amsterdam triangle, we are still no further in coping with a dilemma which Suger and his source the Pseudo-Areopagite would have recognized: where is God?

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