Dark Ecology

Mark Foster Gage

Fall 2016

Yale School of Architecture

The project explores the relationship between architecture and the frequently shifting ecologies of coastal boundaries through the design of a single building.

Papahanaumokuakea is the largest marine conservation area in the United States, a UNESCO world heritage site, and as of 2006 a designated U.S. National Monument. It is located northwest of the westernmost and most remote Hawai’ian Island of Kaua’i. The entity is geologically and ecologically unique in the world, covering roughly 140,000 square miles of reefs, atolls, shallows, and deep sea in the Pacific Ocean. It contains forms of life found nowhere else on earth.

Kaua’i's Na Pali Coast is a pristine fiction; ostensibly pure and positively unthinkable. It is important because it is wild. It is self-willed. The environment teems with great, shifting, complex diversity of both human and nonhuman life. No one species dominates the mix. What is at once perceived of as being natural today is actually the ecological result of antecedent actions, and we must abandon our romanticized view of a nature that was once whole and now has been broken by anthropogenic influence. When trying to re- contextualize the meaning of nature as the basis for a new theoretical framework of ecology, we must seek new answers to the quesiton of what "wild nature" really is. The project considers relational models of ecological spatiality and aims to structurally infuse its context. It confronts the unknown and unknowable.

The lighthouse acts as a beacon for activity both above and below the surface of the water, inviting curiosity through decontextualization and refamiliarization. There is a passage port, a series of docks and launch sites for tourists and visitors to charter boats, hovercrafts, or aircrafts of varied scale to embark upon the waters of Papahanaumokuakea. The result is a new prototype that weaves the extremely biodiverse terrestrial and marine ecologies with the ecology of humans. The project is a testament to and celebration of a new kind of architecture that eludes traditional paradigms of rationalization or standardization. Instead, the focus is on perception, curiosity, and bewilderment.

Freud's 1919 theory of the uncanny resonates here. A fright occurs in the moment when, because of doubling, repetition, or revelation, the familiar becomes disturbingly strange. Freud begins his argument with a discussion of the German words heimlich and unheimlich. Heimlich is usually translated as homeliness, but although it conveys the familiar and the comfortable, it can also refer to "what is concealed and kept hidden."

This second meaning opens up into unheimlich as a fright caused by a disturbing return to something that was once familiar. Thus, though the fright of the uncanny appears to be about something new or unfamiliar, in fact this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.

Timothy Morton writes extensively on hyperobjects — entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing even is in the first place. In a grounding moment, the studio embarked on an outwardly endless hike across a different type of ecological boundary: the lava fields of Kilauea in the Hawai’i Volcano National Park. There was an immediate inability to situate the user into this environment.