Beached
Proposed upon invitation for the Faena Prize in Miami, Beached initially suggests the form of a whale skeleton overgrown by coral, but upon closer examination, is revealed to be the tremendous skeleton of a human woman. Rewilded by the sea, this form is both architectural and biological, reef for a new Atlantis.
Whale beachings defy logic. Why any species would put themselves in life threatening position is a question that takes on new relevance in the face of anthropogenic climate change—and the lack of meaningful effort to address this most existential of threats. The pernicious and intertwined forces of late stage capitalism and human exceptionalism seem to block us from seeing that we are, in a sense, beaching ourselves.
As is now clear to most, Miami is at the forefront of the climate crisis, a bellwether. As sea levels creep higher, the choices that Miami makes will resonate on the global stage. Can we envision the future city that lies beyond?
Beached suggests a climate-conscious position for Miami which holds space for nuance: One that mourns the losses which have already occurred and those that are locked-in——and which also celebrates this strange new world which might grow on the skeleton of the old.
As the only state with extensive shallow reef formations, Florida is unique. This project focuses on coral reefs because of their site-specific relevance, their fascinating beauty, their biological importance——and also because of the extreme level of threat they face due to climate change. Thermal stress causes corals to “bleach,” a condition that often results in the death of these slow growing organisms. Due to climate change, it is possible that 70-90% of coral reefs could to disappear in the next two decades alone.
Therefore this piece is also a memorial and a monument: a memorial to the countless individuals and species which will be lost——and a monument, we can only hope, to our last days in the grip of human exceptionalism, this ‘outsized’ view of our own importance.
Beached proposes a world which stops building monuments to the fiction of the eternal, a world where human culture and the built environment might be allowed to become something strange and wondrously intertwined.