Terra Infirma: Essays on the ‘Ground’
Issue 4: Terra Infirma is published by Koozarch Magazine—A research driven studio and digital magazine exploring unbuilt architectural and design imaginaries.
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Terra Infirma is a gathering of thoughts around the troubled relationship between architecture and its immediate context of “ground”. The material contingency is quite obvious; in order to build, we dig, remove, extract and cover. Yet in the vast majority of architectural drawings, the thickness of ground is non-existent, or at best, simplified. In section, it might be a poche or hatched area surrounding the foundations; in plan, land is a patchwork of parcels representing ownership and commodification of its resources. We deal with objects, ignoring what we assume to be simple ‘dirt’ underneath, with its unseen repositories of lead, carbon and ecosystemic complexity that extends far beyond the building envelope. ‘Ground’ has been compounded with the word ‘zero’ to imply a tabula rasa — but legacies of land grabs, denial of property rights and dispossession go hand in hand with the the legacies of colonialism, apartheid and oppression on racial and ethnographic bases. Then too, vast swathes of ground are ‘sealed’ under concrete, limiting any interactions with what is above and any chemical or life process from naturally happening below; out of sight, out of mind.
This issue aims to share a spectrum of spatial practice addressing the planet’s crust, gathering contributions which speak to the social, cultural, political, technological, economic and ecological contingencies of the ground. Contributions aim to be devices for imagining possible futures and strategies for new world-making actions that change the status quo and don’t surrender to a system whose sole scope is profit.
We start by slicing across professional strata with a conversation between biologist, landscape architect and human geographer Seth Denizen, and dancer, architect and researcher, Victoria McKenzie. Both have been thinking deeply about soil and space; both claim to be dreamers, as dreaming is the imperative permission given to architecture.
