Beneath the Concrete, the Ocean
The history of the 21st century will be written on water. When sea levels are certainly on the rise, the sea becomes our new desert. – MAP Office, 2009
Liquid Land
Our collective future lies in the ocean, and with the ocean. Deep in that future there is history—of pre-modern times when fishing and aquaculture sustained countless populations, and when the fastest way to travel and trade around the world was on a ship. Now with natural marine ecologies under pressure from overfishing, deep-sea resource extraction, inundation by plastic, agricultural and chemical pollution, and the warming effects of climate change, our blue planet’s greatest resource and last remaining commons is under threat.
Far across the disciplinary spectrum from oceanography and marine ecology, architecture is commonly thought of as the practice of constructing buildings as part of terrestrial urban planning. But it can also refer to the structures of complex systems—such as the human brain, the metropolis, or the computer—or, in anthropocentric terms, the human-designed networks of society. It is through this expanded, postmodern sense of architecture that the Hong Kong-based duo Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix, calling their endeavors MAP Office, entered the cultural field, floating between, swimming among, and free diving deep into ecosystems of knowledge. Over time in their studies of the city’s urban and natural settings, MAP Office began to wonder: what if architecture could be thought of like the structure of coral reefs: a model of a multi-dimensional space constructed and maintained by multiple species?
Our conversation in late August in their loft overlooking Hong Kong’s post-industrial port of Chai Wan began with the situation in what they called “the invisible center of madness, of potential war”: the South China Sea, which was in the headlines because of the aggressive military posturing by China, the United States, and other regional states over these contested waters. MAP Office have devised a project
