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In the Pink: The Lively Architectures of a Death Cloud

Part 2 Project 2020
Rosa Whiteley
Royal College of Art | UK
In the climate crisis, architecture must address the exchanges and spaces between the ground and atmosphere.In the Pink addresses the politics of the atmosphere through a study of the “pink death clouds”, which seasonally congregate in the arctic border-lands between Russia and Norway. Since the 1980s, practices of metal smelting have caused these ‘deathly’ clouds to form, leaving behind a toxic footprint and dead zones. Paradoxically, they also are characterised by a multitude of life. Inhabitants – including opportunistic fungi spores and mountain birch trees – are nourished by the cloud’s metallic air and acidic soils.

By devising architectures informed by these relations, In the Pink disassembles dichotomies of life and death, finding potential in the weird assemblage where both exist, in abundance, as a result of the other.A future for the Russian town of Nikel is imagined through a shifting calendar. The project produces typologies that will eventually flourish within putrefied airs and recomposed soils. Opposing the normative paradigms of containment, or segregation, that follow spaces of toxicity and extraction, this project develops the possibilities of multispecies co-existence as a new form of futurity – new architectures found between the ground and the air.


Rosa Whiteley

Tutor(s)
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
Marco Ferrari
Elise Hunchuck
2020
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