Archipiélago Hermoso, Archipelago of the Blessed: Archetypes at the Edge of the World

Torn between the tectonic plates of three continents, neither Europe, Africa, nor America, the Canarian Archipelago has long served as a stage, larder, and microcosm where interrelated European and global crises converge and erupt. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Canary Islands were a nodal stopover harbour for replenishment and supply, and became prototypes for the colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and beyond. Today, the archipelago continues to endure ongoing waves of colonisation; non-stop flights arrive full of Europeans fleeing endless work, inflation, and unaffordability back home. South Americans of mixed indigenous blood flee climate and political-economic crises by the hundreds of thousands, returning to the land that their European ancestors left long ago. Boats packed with struggling African refugees arrive daily if they avoid disaster on the way. But the archipelago they land on is itself struck with drought, and fields of greenhouses in ruins; by cave shacks and ‘informally built’ concrete block towers precariously perched at the edge of plunging ravines overlooking megalithic strips of black asphalt jet runways, and luxury shops, or big box IKEAs and Leroy Merlin home DIY stores. Parched earth and diminishing diversity of its species struggle meters from adventure water parks with replicas of the imperial religious architecture of Angkor Wat. Rows of beach chairs and palm tree-lined turquoise pools in front of hulking ziggurats of hotel rooms are serviced by Big Tech data and travel sites and financed by multinational banks.

These Canarian profit architectures, much like the first wave of colonial types, remind us that for too long, architects have been delegated the task of giving good form to bad content. But they also afford us with a significant register of settlement forms, from the cave-dwellings, seasonal shepherding huts, complex star observatory and parliaments of its first Amazigh-decent dwellers, to the patio-houses that structured colonial power and early monocrop agriculture, to the hotel resorts of today. They also afford us a unique chance to observe differentiation or schismogenesis, situated forms of practice, ritual and song.

The Canary Islands Visiting School, Archipelago of the Blessed, is a seven-year research and practice project that uses architecture’s tools and forms of knowledge to urgently transition away from cultures of endless production and extractivism. During our second year in Gran Canaria, we will focus on learning about—and thinking with—water. Our study will follow water from source to tap, aiming to interrogate our relationship to the architecture of water through a long historical durée. To this end, we are interested in archetypes: examples of landscape, infrastructure, architecture, and even technologies derived from plainly useful and enjoyable features of the terrain—such as plains, caves, terraces, and charcos. We are drawn to forms that are at once common, recognisable, and deeply particular to this place—yet equally almost empty, open to new, free, and shared invention and use.

PROMINENT FEATURES OF THE WORKSHOP/ SKILLS DEVELOPED

Each year we will explore archetypes on each of the islands in the archipelago through drawing, writing, design, and making. Aside from our historical investigation, site observation, and fieldwork, each year we produce speculative architectural proposals. Students will learn a series of skills through lectures, design and making workshops, as well as writing and drawing workshops, and crucially through experiencing the archipelago, through meals and conversations with peers, specialist and non-expert community experts we will encounter in the island.

Learning Outcomes and Outputs

- Experimental Research by Design methods through workshops on writing, drawing, and making

- Field work with academics and practicing architects

- Site and case study drawing techniques

- Thesis-based design proposals

- 1 to 1 fragment and material mock-up construction

- Joint exhibition and event staging