Throughout history the city wall has evolved in response to technological innovation and topographical serendipity. It has mutated from an integrated element of the urban fabric into an autonomous structure that blurs nature and artifice.
Though defensive infrastructure has long ago evaporated into the electro-magnetic spectrum of defensive radar and satellites, in many European cities its presence remains through urban artifacts. The most consequential of these traces are those of transportation infrastructure.
Périph Fluide is about the relationship between the defensive infrastructure of the past and the transportation infrastructure of today, specifically their shared role as a barrier to the movement of the city. The research aims to subvert this barrier by questioning our notions of nature and technology, primarily achieved through architectural siege tactics.
Architectural siege tactics avoid outdated notions of dominion over nature and centralized planning by acting as situational path-making tools, propelled by the energy of ballistics. Just as innovations in ballista were the primary design driver for defensive infrastructure, the ballistics of the highway, automobiles, are harnessed to alter the very landscape they inhabit. Displaced material from excavations self-organize into additional path-making forms as a recollection of the earth-moving central to fortification design.
Rooted within the tangled knot of Paris’ Bercy Interchange, Periph Fluide is the provocation of a fluid urban periphery and a proclamation of the new relationship between the city and its surrounding landscape.