Kinetic Architectures and Geotextile Installations

Philip Beesley, Christine Macy, Andrew Payne, Robert Pepperell, Michael Stacey, Charles Stankievech, Christine Macy, Andrew Payne, Robert Pepperell, Michael Stacey, Charles Stankievech

• Publisher: Riverside Architectural Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780978097851
• eBook ISBN: 9781926724553
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

This book documents architectural installations developed by Beesley and collaborators from 1995 through 2007. The collection includes architectural sculptures located in natural sites and works integrating kinetic components and interactive systems. Projects in the past several years have focused on immersive digitally fabricated lightweight 'textile' structures, and the most recent generations of his work feature responsive systems that use dense arrays of microprocessor, sensors and actuator systems. With contributions by Jean Gagnon, Eric Haldenby, Christine Macy, Andrew Payne, Robert Pepperell, Michael Stacey and Charles Stankievech.

From Flat Stock to Three-Dimensional Immersion

Michael Stacey

The wellspring that courses through Philip Beesley’s work is landscape and humankind’s relationship to the land, the interaction of people and the earth. His interests arise equally from the collective consciousness of humanity and a situated response to a found landscape. His work is a very humane response to the contemporary condition of ecology, and he seeks to progress beyond an abstract Modernism to something richer and more productive. In Art and Industry (1934), Herbert Read thought that art could be divided into two distinct types: humanistic art and abstract art. He defines humanistic art as that, ‘which is concerned with expression in plastic form ideals and emotions.’1 Using Read’s definition, Philip Beesley’s series of installations from Haystack Veil (1998) to Hylozoic Soil (2007) are clearly examples of humanistic art. Read also observed that ‘The man who makes potentially, or partially, is an artist the moment the things he makes express feelings and invite response.’2 Therefore, it is appropriate to consider Philip Beesley as both an artist and an architect, by training and based on his body of work.

Aspects of Beesley’s work are rooted in the vastness of the Canadian landscape. Erratics Net (1998) responds to the glacier-scoured rocky landscape of Nova Scotia, and Beesley speaks eloquently of standing on this granite outcrop and being able to experience a connection with the earth and the millennia (about 5,000 million years) since the formation of this crystalline igneous rock. Beesley is also responding to humankind’s actions on the Canadian landscape—the destruction caused by the extraction or the pollution of the landscape by heavy industry, which has been evocatively depicted by Edward Burtynsky. Orgone Reef (2004), exhibited as part of the Digital Fabricators3 exhibition, can be read as an experimental geotextile, which by deploying artificial and natural processes, has the capability of creating a new landscape. A hybrid ecology implicitly capable of healing the earth; healing the scars of industry and capitalism as William Morris had longed for. There is a romantic quality to Beesley’s work but it would be wrong to view it as utopian. Nor is it a dystopic warning to humankind, as penned by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake (2003), in which she writes:

On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the ink and blue lagoon. The shrieks of the birds that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble sound almost like holiday traffic.4

The installation Hylozoic Soil invites the viewer or participant to reconsider his or her relationship to nature and to the near future of human ecology. The installation is immersive in its visual provocation; it is biomimetic, romantic, dreamy, inventive, and an exemplar of spatial poetry. Yet Beesley’s work goes beyond biomimicry, seeking a synthesis between nature and artifice. Central to this train of thought is the desire to harmonize artificial and natural processes, and to expose similarities in the act of creation in the human mind and nature. The influence of the brilliant Scottish scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson is clear from the organic geometry used in many of the installations, and can be evidenced by Beesley’s organization of a conference—along with Sarah Bonnemaison—at the University of Waterloo in the fall of 2001. The conference took its title from Thompson’s seminal book On Growth and Form (1917), and Beesley has taken more from Thompson than a mere interest in the mathematics and geometry of living organisms. In fact, he opened the conference proceedings with the following quotation from On Growth and Form: ‘Matter as such produces nothing, changes nothing, does nothing…[it] can never act as matter alone, but only as seats of energy and as centres of force.’5

His time in Italy as winner of the Prix de Rome in 1995-6 appears to have been a formative experience: working with an archaeologist, he recorded ritual burials of ancient Rome. He drew inspiration from this u...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Disintegrating Matter, Animating Fields
• Posthumanism and the Challenge of New Ideas
• Sewing/Sowing: Cultivating Responsive Geotextiles
• Surface: Between Structure and Sense
• From Flat Stock to Three-Dimensional Immersion
• Credits
• Biographies