EXP3 Submission Component Seven - Completed Environment

The school building rises from the side of the mountain, amongst a long dead glade of trees, its pylons ablaze with a bleached green emulating the acid atmosphere. The building nihilistically embraces the death of this landscape. It is a memorial, a monument to a land in necrotic stasis. Its geometry is that of a the black stone of the mountain range - hard, angular, skeletal.

To reach the building, or to make the crossing to the other side, you must brave one of two spans. Minimally sheltered, you will experience nature's behemoth before you reach your goal. To cross the bridge is to come to know the elements that will inevitably destroy it. The orange tone of the steel bridge spans is a challenge to the bitter surrounds to degrade it through erosion, and a dare to the student or traveller to step trustingly on a platform that might not hold.

The lecture theatre crowns the building - the pinnacle. It looks out to the barren peaks; a reminder to the students within that they work under forces greater than anything they will ever achieve. A constant reminder is intended to encourage those within to embrace the futility -in the face of the entropic forces of time - of the many projects they will produce, and therefore to foster the conviction that there need be no limits to the creative imagination.

In approached the requirement of a folly separate to the main building, and the extravagance of two separate elevators to provide access to the folly, through a skeptical lens. Where Lowe might approach this requirement as emblematic of a smarter architecture, I would suggest that this requirement is fundamentally problematic. In response to this requirement then, I chose to provide two elevators that traverse one kilometre of cold, wind, and snow unsheltered, and unprotected.

Similarly, the folly on the valley floor rises out of the icy water. The platform of the folly is likewise exposed and unprotected. Thus to make use of this folly or the elevators that have been designed solely to serve it are an exercise in nihilistic submission to a deadly environment. Indeed, this architecture is one of desolation. It awaits the day when its occupants flee the oppression that embraces, and when it can crown its mountain in malevolent solitude.