The Pebble, a shelter.
The Pebble is an educational facility, set 200 years in the future, designed to mitigate the effects of extreme weather conditions.
How do you heal the earth where there’s concrete? This question formed the start of this project for me spurred on by the site that we were given, a small gas works in Bradford (Manchester), the site had previously had a large steel frame there but having recently been removed the only thing left was the concrete cap left in the ground to cover over the polluted earth underneath. So there was a scar on the ground that without humans would never have been there, and without them would likely be there for a long time, given my posthuman atelier I needed a natural way to remove that concrete and then ideally reuse it.
Plants all have the ability to rip open stones, root prying is the process of a plant finding a weak point in a rock and by expanding its routes through that weak point, prying the stone open it was this that I specified would break that concrete.
This process will take a long time, so I had to consider the future my building would be constructed in, having researched work on the progressing climate crisis I found that the extreme weather conditions of the world will become more global, and so my building needs to serve to protect the people of the site in whatever future they find it in. It also needs to be able to help them progress which is why I felt it had to be an educational facility; it serves to allow people to grow and to learn again in a world that has been focused on survival for so long.
