WeatherField: Lateral Office

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010

The work of Lola Sheppard, Mason White, and Matthew Spremulli’s Lateral Office engages issues of environmental performance. Architecture is conceived as inherently flexible and responsive not only to the changing internal pressures of human inhabitation but to the complex and often fraught external pressures of the environment as well. Furthermore, the practice seeks to convert crisis into opportunity by harnessing the forces of a planet at risk in the development of new trajectories for architecture and design. Indeed, whereas many contemporary practices focus on solving normative problems with conventional solutions, Lateral Office describes theirs as a “research vehicle” for posing new questions regarding the state of the built environment in the twenty-first century. The work seeks to address a wide range of challenges and opportunities related to the alarming albeit nebulous effects of climate change, often by transcending the terrestrial limits of conventional architectural practice. Rather than limit the art of building to the stability of solid ground, architecture’s traditional foundation, both in literal and figurative terms, Lateral Office often explores the more temporal, contingent, and thus unpredictable foundations of water, ice, light, temperature, and air to anchor its work.

Located along a beach in Abu Dhabi, WeatherField is a proposal for an energy generation park that operates simultaneously as public space and wind-harnessing infrastructure. Unlike conventional forms of energy production, however, such as nuclear power or coal mining, both of which are inaccessible to the public due to the threat they pose to human as well as environmental health, WeatherField reimagines a new era of energy production in which public space, the natural environment, and infrastructure are compatible with and indeed mutually beneficial to one another. Comprised of two hundred “para-kites” tethered to the ground yet perpetually suspended in the sky, WeatherField is both aesthetic and instrumental in its performance. While producing wind energy, the system also allows its human occupants to influence the trajectory of the para-kites, producing what Lateral Office calls “sky-writing kite festivals” in which humans harness the weather field to generate visual forms of energy as well. Lateral Office describes the project as a “barometer” that indexes both human and environmental forms of pressure over time.

Night rendering of WeatherField proposal, Abu Dhabi.

Day rendering of WeatherField proposal, Abu Dhabi. Courtesy Lateral Office.