We continue our time-saving survey of projects situated on that ambiguous line separating land and water with Fabrizio Matillana's Marsh Condenser, one of the ecoMachines coming out of Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto's studio at the AA.
Matillana describes his ecoMachine as “an evolutionary infrastructure situated in the Essex estuary, restoring lost marshland ecologies through a park typology based on sediment collecting ‘folies’ [sic] bridging the dynamic flood cycles of the site and the public that visit the natural reserve.”
These follies act “as a combination of hard and soft engineering technique to increase accretion levels within the test site which is necessary to stabilize marshland in risk. Soft engineering in the sense that it is highly sensitive to its positioning in relation to the environmental dynamics and stresses that contribute to the preservation or destruction of a marshland ecology. Hard engineering in its material presence acting as ‘sediment corset’ and allowing an architectural intervention that embeds itself within the emerging ecology.”
Slurry #1