Forged Hollows

Forged Hollows
Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Critic: Eduardo Rega Calvo

TA: Amy Koenig

// A post-industrial fabricated reality confronts its diminution, allowing hyper-reality to entomb a hidden hollow, where Venturi’s idea of poche “contradiction between the inside and the outside…manifest[ing] itself in an unattached lining which produces an additional space” emerges. A new world unfurled invites unexpected inhabitants, fusing nature and industry to estrange this new existence where the boundaries between the natural and the manufactured are blurred.

// Part 2: A Speculative Fabulation (a la Donna Haraway):

// “In a world of post-industrialization, where are the inhabitants of the natural realm to live? Here imagined, the chimney replaces the tree, the disused furnace the cave, slag heaps the duff. Totoro, a spirit of the forest is forced to seek other habitation without the safety of his camphor tree hollow. Totoro is a tree spirit, typically residing in his 1300-year-old camphor tree. In an age where deindustrialization has left steel and iron ruins dotted along the landscape, new ecosystems have arisen. Where factories mass-produced low-priced consumer goods, steel, and other commodities we now have in their vacancy an environment where plant life begins to retake the human realm. Totoro, being a tree spirit finds the empty chambers of the blast furnaces to be a suitable substitute for his tree. With his two smaller companions they nest into the ruins and use their powers of plant growth to cover the former mill with plant growth. With the birth of a new industrial “forest” other spirits are soon attracted, including the radish spirit. A large burly spirit whose representation of the humble radish brings food and sustenance to their newfound home. The former furnace chambers act as shelter with the mazelike system of pipework acting as transportation tubes allowing the spirits to inhabit the ruins while never being seen by the human world. With their abundant collection of acorns, the former blast furnace crucible provides ample space for their hoard.”