for

Streamlines, Vortices & Plumes

Dr Lisa Moffitt
Dr Simone Ferracina

ESALA
MArch 2018/19


in collab. with

> Laura Haylock
Katy Sidwell



immersive infrastructures



Immersive Infrastructures explores the process of closing loops of material and energetic systems within operational, re-purposed and obsolete infrastructures.

Investigations were initiated by the design of a filling tank model that visualised buoyancy-induced airflow whilst recycling associated material streams into their constituent elements – water, salt and dye.

The tank is a pivot between scales; between the controlled site of the studio and the contingent sites of Svartsengi and Bath; between the performativity of recording immersion at building scale and the performance of calibrating individual components at the infrastructural scale.

Design interventions are sited within distinct layers of the filling tank, thus displacing infrastructural conditions from the ground and exaggerating strange juxtapositions of natural and artificial systems in place at the Blue lagoon.

Further architectures, including Rewilding Obsolescence, operate within a post-carbon narrative for Bath. Space heating is radically reduced, and the historic social practice of bathing is de-centralised and re-democratised, serving as an anchor for local thermal hubs. Post-carbon Bath is projected as a landscape of strange and intricate re-appropriations of existing infrastructural and building fabrics.