Planting Seeds

These two bodies begin as seeds, and within these seeds is contained genetic information which informs the growth of the bodies. Each body grows differently: The earthen body grows radially, like roots, in all directions, and slowly, methodically. The heavy masonry must be well planned, not reacting to the nuances of daily life, but rather reflecting upon trends and traditions, long-term trajectories, steady-state transformations.

The flying body grows more like an animal, fast and on the road to autonomy, constantly poking and provoking it's environment out of necessary curiosity. It darts about quickly, growing rapidly in some places, consuming what is no longer necessary and recombining it with immediate necessities. The flying body has the ability to change rapidly, based once again on an underlying genetic code. However, the speed at which these changes occur allows for a kind of instability, a temporality where nothing is reliable, nothing is for certain. Everything must be questioned, and it is the nature of this body that demands this kind of questioning.

But the way this body must grow is coded in an unfamiliar language. Here we jump to the construction techniques of this school. The formal conception uses extremely flexible material, lightweight, permeable and easily manipulable. The issue at hand is that the performance of this material does not maintain with scale. Actual construction materials are much stiffer, less flexible, heavier than those in the model. Thus, rather than being able to stretch where necessary, the full-scale material will have to be cut and stitched, much like that of a piece of clothing, in order to fulfill their formal requirements. These seams fall into three-dimensional space, and the performance of these materials at full scale are figurable in two ways: one, by experimentation, and the other (which fits wonderfully into our seeding concept) via the computer. The computer can calculate the patterns necessary to construct this flying school. Thus, the computer lab (at the center) is the seed which will allow the remainder of the school to grow out from. It is the RNA, the decoder for the genome.