A project I've been meaning to write about ever since it won first place at RIBA's 2005 President's Medals awards is Luke Pearson's maritime exploration of "the ship as a 'dry-docked' architecture."
"The scheme is a retirement home for elderly fisherman that also houses a working men's club for members of Newcastle’s fishing community," Pearson writes. "As a reflection of the separation and torpor of this unique society, the scheme takes the notion of the ship in an architectural context, to create an ersatz environment which interacts with the city around it as if it were a dry docked vessel. The environmental technologies and the ways in which the notional ship has been translated into an architectural system are the focus of this study."
In other words, you dock the ship for so long it becomes architecture, an extension of the earth's surface into the sea.
Pearson's ship/building – perhaps ship.bldg – would include a "heated superstructure" and a "microcosmic ocean upon deck" (both pictured above).
Then there is Pearson's technique of "Alephographic drawing." Pearson describes this part of the project as having been "inspired by Borges"; the image, below, "sees everything revealing the technologies and notorieties that exist within the Vessel."
Now a similar such project needs to be worked out with a train, stopped for so long in the center of a city it becomes architectural, permanently anchored and settled there on tracks, perhaps with moving rooms, parts of a building detach then reattach to other buildings; then further projects with other forms of transport: helicopters, lorries, school buses, hovercraft... The future architecture of stalled vehicles.
Or, to quote Thomas Pynchon, who is here referring to a missile if I remember correctly: "The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall."
(Luke Pearson's project spotted long, long ago on Archinect; see also Student projects 4, 3, 2, and 1).
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