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 The Able Skin is a standardized cellular structure designed to hide landmark buildings and monuments, indefinitely. The Able Skin is a technologically mediated architectural prosthesis, a rigid interface that envelops buildings with the simple geometry of boring rectangular modules.
The interior of the Skin acts as a projection screen where information generated by the building in the outside world (such a web sites, diagrams, mementos, etcetera) is presented back to the building. Thus, the Skin is simultaneously a mirror and a cybernetic landscape which replaces the real landscape, establishing a technologically mediated feedback loop on issues such as place, monument and representation. The Able Skin presents an ironic reading of the archetypical and necrophilic culture of architectural conservationism: a culture that turns buildings into vampires condemned to eternal existence. Facing the impossibility of architectural euthanasia--the respectful, ecological, economically-sound, liberating and dignified assisted-death of a building--, I propose the construction of a high-tech coffins for vampire buildings. |
