The result of various conversations over the years, this design has been sitting in my mind for a while.
This is but one iteration of what such a structure might look like. Its far more likely that re-use, patching and scavenging will keep the existing housing stock viable for decades after the fall. That’s not to say that we’re living now where those who follow us will need to.
New structures, using whatever knowledge and technology we can still wield are going to be a necessity.
Over the last week I took part in this new means of story-telling.
See this link for, perhaps, too much explanation: Pages Fall Review_SND
The unfurled artefact that the reader takes on their journey.
Those scant few colours of the ships disguised for warfare beyond the arctic circle lend a patterned, stylised simplicity to their purpose. War-paint for sea-cutting hulls of steel. Fragile shells against both the elements and Man’s violences. Now the patterns become an aggressive form of representing dis-order; an affective means to portray an awareness of our current environment.
From pg. 33 of H.M.S. Ulysses (Maclean, 1979):
“Where the Ulysses went, there also went death. But Death never touched her. She was a lucky ship. A lucky ship and a ghost ship and the Arctic was her home.
Illusion of course, this ghostliness, but a calculated illusion. The Ulysses was designed specifically for one task, for one ocean, and the camouflage experts had done a marvellous job. The special Arctic camouflage, the broken, slanting diagonals of grey and white and washed-out blues merged beautifully, imperceptibly into the infinite shades of grey and white, the cold, bleak grimness of the barren northern seas.”
So begins an exploration of possible patterns the fictional H.M.S. Ulysses might have worn.
Panels from various sources depicting Arctic camouflage for naval vessels.
The battered cover of the 1979 re-print.
The cover of my copy of the 32nd edition of Alistair Maclean’s H.M.S Ulysses, an astounding tale of men, the sea, and a war upon, under and above it.
Cleanly written, Maclean’s first novel, published in 1959, is semi-autbiographical. It serves in part to illustrate his time upon HMS Royalist, another Dido Class destroyer, similar to the ship the novel follows.
The story follows the Ulysses as it escorts a convoy of merchant shipping toward allied Russia in early 1943 and her trials before reaching friendly waters.
The description the hardship forced upon those humans plying the Arctic in winter leaps out, and the plight of those separate characters and their fragile steel vessels is made more meaningful for it.
An entity needs a visual identity, it’s typeface, colours, symbols. The below should speak for itself.
The skull & heart equate to the cycle of life and death
The crossed pillar and axe the destructive nature of Man’s efforts to control nature.
Potential logo for a new architecture.
It represents a re-building, but one which accepts it’s own impermanence.
And there she lay. Adams saw the dark hulk looming across the mud of estuary, he shivered; anticipating the unpleasantness ahead. The Great ship stood tall of the mire to cast a monumental shadow which reached almost to the bare dunes where he and Jonas, still panting, lay. Adams could hear Jonas’ ragged breaths even over the rasp of the salt crusted marram grass stiring in the airs from the sea. It occurred to him then that if the Doctor wern’t aboard then Jonas probably wouldn’t make it at all. Sighing at the thought of effort wasted he reached for his canteen and passed the nearly dry vessel to the older man. Jonas took it without word of thanks, and Adams hand’t looked for any, instead scanning the derricks and pontoons about for signs of some poor sentry on duty, bound to watch the beached ship on this cold night.
And so it was that they came eventually to Rokfeyry and its wide bay of tidal mud. In the moonlight an on-shore breeze caught the light from sharp line of tide-scum and threw sparks into the midnight air, the salt tang gorgeous to their heath-ravaged lungs. Closer in, nearer the tide mark arrayed before them as a scythe lost in stubble, lay a beach of grey sand.
An encouragement to write, the anonymous audience of the web the impetus to do the thing right.
This is Page One.
Space. Narrative. Design. 