'The AR-k' is a long-term oral history archive located on the Somerset Levels, which is also composed as the architectural equivalent of a love letter to George’s homeland. Rooted in the rich mythical history and contemporary local culture of Somerset and Glastonbury, the project imagines an innovative hybrid between architecture and its extension through augmented reality.
The final fictional proposal takes on a monastic, sound recording and producing arrangement, inspired by the overnight stays in Sainte Marie de La Tourette, but also Claude Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, and visits to Le Corbusier's Firminy and Ronchamp chapels.
Head archaeologist, Dr Fouracres, is a guide in the far future setting of 2442, and describes the gradual discovery of a mixed physical/digital ruin. The project considers the material and immaterial aspects of architectural heritage, playing with scale and deep time to depict a warning for the future.
Architecture becomes a reliquary hosting the lost sounds of the past through audio as well as visual augmentation coded in matter. An ode to both the relationship between physical space and its digital extensions, but also to the design process itself, the film is a feat of architectural storytelling.
Working from ruinous fragments scattered across the long-flooded Somerset Level, Dr Fouracres begins to piece the AR-k together, through hybrid physical digital models.
View of the Glastonbury site office with full scale fragment and composite model, 2442.
The fragments provide enough information for the eventual realisation of the complete structure of the AR-k, a floating oral history archive.
The film is cut with scenes of the structure as it would have appeared within the Somerset Levels; its spaces are presented from a first person perspective.
Scale model and reconstruction.