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'Radiant Soil,' by Philip Beesley
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Clusters of interlinked LED lights emit bright flashes and ripples as viewers pass through the space.
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A view of Radiant Soil's "canopy." By enveloping the viewer in a forest-like space of synthetic yet responsive materials, Beesley seeks to challenge Western, inorganic traditions of architecture. "The layers are deeply worked and have their own dynamics, where we navigate and perhaps negotiate with the environment."
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"Perhaps there's something really vital in the sense of mold, or decay, or renewal, or vitality that points to fertility as a way of conceiving of architecture," Beesley says. "And that implies a more diffusive form language, in which structures reach out and are open, as opposed to closed, hard minimalism."
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The entire system is interconnected, with every movement and reaction triggering a chain of actions throughout. "That’s one of the things I really enjoy about this system," the artist explains. "It contains some really simple things, things that are tangible, like a light softly glowing and moving on and off, or a chain of things happening, like a domino chain, one after the other... Those individual, simple, concurrent actions build up into chorus-like hives and swarms of behavior."
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Going forward, Beesley hopes to incorporate more advanced learning technologies into Radiant Soil, which would allow the system to adapt and respond to human behavior with even greater fluidity and intelligence.
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"The work is radically synthetic," Beesley says. "I don't consider it particularly naturalistic. It's more the involvement of being in the wilderness — the states of flux and instability — that this work starts to acquire."
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Beesley situates Radiant Soil within a broader "new paradigm" of responsive architecture, where structures and humans engage in a more fluid form of symbiosis. "While the active systems of this architecture give us shelter and spin around us, they’re also harvesting off of us, and wanting us to come to them," he says. "That sets up a mutual relationship of exchange, if not a more animal-based relationship."
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"The work is radically synthetic," Beesley says. "I don't consider it particularly naturalistic. It's more the involvement of being in the wilderness — the states of flux and instability — that this work starts to acquire."
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Beesley situates Radiant Soil within a broader "new paradigm" of responsive architecture, where structures and humans engage in a more fluid form of symbiosis. "While the active systems of this architecture give us shelter and spin around us, they’re also harvesting off of us, and wanting us to come to them," he says. "That sets up a mutual relationship of exchange, if not a more animal-based relationship."
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The system is hulking, immersive, and meticulously constructed, but Beesley says there's an undercurrent of decay to it, as well. "There's a sense of moving toward a mortality, in which the presences that we build are unapologetically temporary. It can go through a set of transitions, and fade, and extinguish and arise again," he says. "That kind of participation in something which is almost a counter-form to the eternal, a kind of relishing of mortality, produces a festive, rather poignant role for architecture."
