Sirenuse: Weathers

Chicago, Illinois, 2011

The work of Sean Lally’s WEATHERS can be understood as a flexible and responsive systems-based approach, engaging the motility of human subjects as well as the constant micro- and macro-fluctuations of the environmental performance. Lally’s work is situated within a particular lineage of architectural history, namely the technologically infused work of the 1960s that sought to work within the less tangible domain of temperature, light, moisture, and sound through the regulation of building systems as a means of shaping architectural space, and with it, forms of human activity. WEATHERS quite literally explores “architectural weather,” thus shifting a conventional conception of the discipline away from building as material object and toward a conception of building as immaterial environment.

Sirenuse is a speculative proposal for an exterior public space in Chicago, Illinois. The artificial “mound” and surrounding ground areas of the site provide for a series of relatively conventional ergonomic conditions, i.e. seating and reclining. However, the primary intention of the project is to utilize climate as a principal means of influencing various forms of human inhabitation. Thus, rather than relying on the conventions of physical enclosure, typically produced through the deployment of columns, partitions, doors, windows, and ceilings, Sirenuse is a completely “open-air” environment comprised only of a single, gently fluctuating artificial ground plane. Environmental control systems embedded into it serve to regulate temperature, moisture, light, and sound over time and in response to changing social and environmental conditions. The project endeavors to produce “architectural space” and by extension a sense of place that is inherently public, to the extent that it fosters human interaction and exchange, but without relying on the codified expectations of physical enclosure. Instead, Sirenuse might be described as an environmental machine that performs both socially and environmentally over time in a highly flexible and responsive manner, calibrating artificially induced micro-weather patterns as a means of supporting various forms of human activity. The project could almost be described as anti-architectural. If architecture is typically associated with built form and by extension the qualities of stasis and permanence, Sirenuse is very much the opposite — a barely perceptible light and temperature zone in constant flux.

Rendering of Sirenuse proposal. Courtesy Sean Lally/WEATHERS.