EARTH PROTECTOR

Earth Protector is an idea about buildings that land on the earth rather than emerging from it, creating powerful new silhouettes against the sky.

Earth Protector buildings are very large, built from massive leaning slabs. They project district-scale shade across the city, creating vast indoor/ outdoor spaces.

They protect the inhabitants of the earth as well as the earth itself.

Earth Protector tells us what the future looks like.

Earth Protector is kind.

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This project is an investigation of the formal potentials of super-slender, super-flat volumes (a.k.a. “the flat out large”). Slabs are tiny in one dimension and huge in the other two, monolithic, and ignore the gravitational axis. They can be moved, rotated, copied, and scaled, but not deformed or transformed or otherwise damaged. They stack loosely, lean on one another obliquely, or appear to delicately support one another like a house of cards. Compositions of slabs appear playful and provisional, and appear to exist in a different time and scale than everyday reality.

In a world full of congestion and medium-scaled humanist buildings, there are many advantages to these mysterious Earth Protector (EP) buildings, which have small footprints, small profiles, and large graphic elevations. Their size and slenderness resonate with contemporary building types: megamats provide massive floor plates for highly sought-after creative and tech spaces; superslabs respond to the tiny housing revolution with contracted floor plate depths. Defying the extruded, gravity-centric city of the 20th century, EP buildings drop down from above, creating cities on top of cities, something Timothy Morton and I call “hypercities.” Where they land, they create discrete, bounded spaces like interiors of giant houses.

Loosely composed EP buildings enclose space not only by operating as roofs and walls, but through shadow-cast ground objects that spread out below, seemingly indifferent to the capitalist land subdivisions they cut across. Shadow-cast ground objects are like stages for social and political life that gather and protect citizens. Major roadways are pushed below grade to make these stages free for pedestrian life, urban furnishings, gardens, and pop-up programming.

The sheer scale of the slabs —and their inclination to the sky—turns them into giant solar power plants. The solar field type, once relegated to the outskirts of cities, somewhere out there, is suddenly an urban idea. Powering themselves as well as the city they “house” below, EP buildings are energy-discrete and part of a new way of thinking about energy today—in terms of plentitude rather than lack.