DUAL: Ecology 1 - Site

Even the novice real estate investor knows: there is no new land - terra firma is limited. The natural environment and the built environment exist in a symbiotic relationship that has become seamless – an environment that exists outside of our intervention is no longer a possibility. The landscape of abandoned, underutilized, current and future infrastructures is the “new land”. Any conceptual notion of what site is today must recognize a larger ecology that contains the sum of the variables of a particular intersection between nature and built form and be held accountable to produce designs that operate in tandem with it.

DUAL is a critical Design Practice that examines of the overlap between existing environments and new programmatic and spatial implants. This thinking spans from the urban to the rural, from the home to furniture, and from the material to the fastener. DUAL is the double reading of intention in combination with the execution of programmed space and the historical transformation of that space.

DUEL: Ecology 2 - Tectonics

…The tectonic lies suspended between a series of opposites, above all between the ontological and the representational. However, other dialogical conditions are involved in the articulation of tectonic form, particularly the contrast between the culture of the heavy - stereotomics, and the culture of the light - tectonics. -  Kenneth Frampton  -  "Rappel a L’ordre, The Case for the Tectonic"

The transition from stereotomic base to tectonic frame, as Frampton suggests, can be called the very essence of architecture. This archetypal interplay between heavy and light, solid and void, or base and frame can also be considered the intersection of technological innovation over time. The need for a construct to be anchored physically to a site prompts this dialogue of opposites. In seeming contradiction, the heavy ground that tethers a building to site affords the inhabitation of the sky itself. The forward thrust of the tectonic trajectory of ever more technologically advanced materials, assemblies and structural systems fuels this contradiction.  

DUEL is the battle and thus the negotiated truce between the heavy and the light, site and building, form and drawing.