To accompany a piece I was writing for the CFC Media Lab’s blog, I shot these photos of Philip Beesley Architect Inc.‘s Sargasso installation at the 2011 Luminato Festival… and a few more at PBAI’s studio in Toronto’s west end.
Delicate and yet aggressive structures of webs and skeletons ascend above you, colourful mixtures of wet chemicals swishing and condensing throughout. The experience is not unlike drifting through a coral reef, except that the reef floats above rather than unfurls below… kelp forests might be a better comparison. A diversity of strange forms abound, resembling creatures that would look at home in the ocean’s hyper-pressurized depths. The interplay between phyla and species makes it difficult at first to contextualize Beesley’s pieces in human terms, and yet they are decidedly technological… mechanical mutations thriving at the fringe of some emergent ecological niche.
You can read my full piece on Sargasso, and the innovations coming out of Philip Beesley Architect Inc. right here.
Long exposure of Sargasso, at Brookfield Place
Iterative design at Philip Beesley Architect Inc.
Luminato crowds interacting with Sargasso.
In these long exposures, I tried to capture Sargasso's technorganic ambience.
More work-in-progress at Philip Beesley Architect Inc.
An unexpected surprise at the top of Brookfield Place's escalators.
You can read my full piece on Sargasso, and the innovations coming out of Philip Beesley Architect Inc. right here.