God Given Talent: Epiphytic Architecture and The Trans-Spectacular Karaoke Box
From ITPedia
| Made by | BRETT SCHULTZ |
| Made for | Final Project Seminar Spring '05 with Kadambari Baxi |
| Short description | God Given Talent is a portable structure designed to facilitate rooftop karaoke parties, powered exclusively by renewable energies. |
| Displayed at (Venues) | Thesis Spring 2005 |
| Homepage Location | http://epi-arc.org/ |
| Additional Keywords | architecture, epiphyte, epiphytic, radical, karaoke, rooftop, city |
Description
Abundant though largely neglected, urban rooftop space offers incredible possibilities for experimental architecture and creative activity within the city. Manhattan alone has 170 million square feet of flat rooftops; however, this space is scattered, discrete, and often difficult to access. Proposed here is an agenda for use embodied within a new form of architecture: 'epiphytic' architecture.
The term is derived from a category of plant-life -- the epiphyte -- which includes mosses, lichens, and orchids, among others. Epiphytes are essentially plants that grow upon other plants. However, unlike parasites, they do not rely on their hosts for any nutrients or sustenance; the host's support is purely physical. Epiphytes instead obtain their nutrients from air, rain, sunlight, and organic debris. At increased elevation, access to these energies can be vastly improved.
Metaphorically, epiphytic architectures model is the Tank Bromeliad. Central to the structure of this epiphyte is a water reservoir, or phytotelm, which itself hosts a diverse micro-community of insect and amphibian life. That is to say: the Tank Bromeliad, literally, is epiphytic architecture.
On a human scale, epiphytic architecture borrows from its biological namesake in a number of ways: its strict use of sustainable energies, its lightweight and portable construction, its ephemeral nature, its facilitation of temporary communities, and its benign but advantageous relationship to its supporting structure.
Yet epiphytic architecture also stretches beyond direct metaphor in that its central purpose is the creation of social entertainment space. It is not an attempt to create permanent habitat. Nor is it a blindly utopian project intended to bring strangers together in forced community. Rather, epiphytic architecture is ideally a project for an intentional, voluntary group of already familiar individuals.
The 'God Given Talent' project, in particular, is epiphytic architecture for group karaoke. Though any number of activities could have been chosen, the selection of karaoke is significant. Karaoke maintains a uniquely exciting tension between cooperation and competition, collectivism and individualism. It invites individual participation and rewards talent, but its overall success relies on an entire groups acceptance of and adherence to a set of typically implicit behavioral rules.
Karaoke is, fundamentally, group pursuit of self-satisfying entertainment, which mirrors the core motivation of epiphytic architecture perfectly.
In practical terms, God Given Talent will comprise a portable, open, tent-like structure, equipped with one or more means of renewable energy production and storage in addition to a small collection of consumer-electronic devices, used for the purposes of a small, rooftop-based karaoke party.
The structure will collect energy over the course of one or more days; following sundown, it will be activated and allowed to run until its batteries have been fully depleted. This may be repeated any number of times in any number of locations.
References
<a href="http://del.icio.us/brettschultz/thesis/">http://del.icio.us/brettschultz/thesis/</a>
