Chris Collyer Y5
Ne(i)ther Regions
Embracing softness dismantles rigid dualistic thinking and traditional classifications, foregrounding the enacted performative, whereby generative cyclical processes are crucially facilitated. New modes of ambiguous living are generated while restoring common relationship with uncanny landscapes.
Ne(i)ther Regions seeks to restore Boston’s soft landscape history through an ongoing wide-scale salt marsh reclamation in Boston Harbour. Facilitated by cycles of infrastructural dredging, the newly formed natural reserve seeks to uncover renewed solidarity between land, water city, harbour community and marshland.
Just as the wetland enacts simultaneous processes of begetting and destroying, living and dying, the proposed architectural system is continually made and unmade, created and destroyed in cyclical processes of generative repetition between the performance of natural weathering and community maintenance and care. It invites the Boston community to engage with the crucially performative nature of the wetland, whereby its ambiguity no longer elicits Cartesian disgust but mutual pleasure amongst the soft practice of mending while inhabiting the city's landscape and seasons.
