Mars on the Move

University of Malta, Master’s in Architecture, 2015

Pretext: In escaping an ill-fated Earth, how might one live on Mars? A civilisation capable of surviving the planet’s conditions are forced to live a life under the chase of frequent sandstorms.

Mars on the move is an exercise in pushing the boundaries of what it means to dwell. Architecture on Mars transcends serving as a tool – as shelter. In an extension and exaggeration of roles, buildings themselves are able the think. In this hypothetical game in which a civilisation must outrun its climatic threats, an imaginative scenario unfolds, where an architecture overcomes its presumed staticity, evolving into an architecture which is Topotransegric – “a kinetic structural system, capable of various transformations, that constantly evaluates its surroundings and reconfigures according to these changing conditions and assigned program” (Rasha Al Shami)

Evaluating surroundings means navigating physical terrain and equally social terrain. How does an architecture respond to a civilisation’s desires, emotions, sensations; in all their diversity? Delving down a Deleuzian avenue, the project posits that dwelling is indeed the product of how a built form is met with such abstract notions; the outcome being deeply rooted in one’s preconceptions, memory, personal experience and expectation. In configuring space and program for its civilisation, architecture on Mars dissolves from a predetermined and built form, into a set of virtualities.

“Virtualities can be taken up and actualised, composed and recomposed. Their program involves unmaking everything that one knows, and then showing how, with just a little order, a world takes shape and dissolves” (Deleuze and Guattari)

Mars on the Move visualises these virtualities – mobile constellations of points, singularities, forces intersecting planes or lines in the millieux. Form takes a holiday, and attention is entirely focussed on the social dimension of form. It is the social energy that drives the movement; calm, excited, ominous or auspicious.