Student projects 4: The scrap lung

BLDGBLOG's year-end look at cool student projects continues now with the Scrap Lung by Russell Pearce, winner of a Serjeant Award at this year's Royal Institute of British Architects' President's Medals ceremony.


The project comes with these awesome little machine-diagrams –


– that show "hydro-arms... constructed from degrading machinery."


It then proceeds through a series of exquisite mechanical studies illustrating "the motion of canal pumps and grapple cranes across the envelope of the architecture" –


– before framing the spatial realization of the ultimate form (a "degrading membrane, leached with iron oxide"), in the process demonstrating how the building will be used and inhabited.


Pearce's design statement includes the following rather cryptic description: "Conversations formed amongst degrading machinery and hydrolysis limbs, etching time based vectors into their tissue and leaching iron oxide poetically across the architectural membrane. Capillaries of canal fluid percolate through its skin, chemically distilled, generating energy to clean, paint, heat, and breathe new temporary fabrics towards the city."
It's architecture come to life, breathing itself through a scrap lung.
Someone sign this man a film contract.

(Spotted via Archinect).