Instrumental Architecture

The work presented here looks at a reclaimed landscape around the village of Tollesbury on the Essex coast. The village of Tollesbury, is set amongst farmland, reclaimed from salt-marsh some two hundred years ago. As pressure on the embankments around the village increases, and maintenance costs rise, the future of the landscape is uncertain - in places the sea has already been allowed to flood back into the fields, forming new marshland. In the project I explore an architecture, set in an imagined future of 2065, that mediates between the village and the metamorphosing landscape around it.

The project draws on 17th Century scientific instrumentation, that in its time was an important tool in investigating the dynamic connections between the material world and immaterial ideas or perceptions. The ?Instrumental Architecture? that results, operates in a similar fashion, and treats context as a series of interrelated systems (rather that a set of picturesque views and historiographies) that inform the dynamic interaction between the scheme and its changing coastal landscape.

The project is explored in models and drawings, that have a deliberately ambiguous presence between architecture and instrument. The ?architectural instruments? themselves speak of the landscape from which they are abstracted, but are also intended to be experienced as actual objects that allow the viewer encounter the performance of the proposal, and reveal new interpretations of the landscape.

Kyle?s technique is original, rigorous and truly exploratory. His work demonstrates a meticulous attention to detail. His architecture too incorporates a variety of scales and at the same time scalelessness. His machinic viewing devices, utilise lenses that focus, enlarge and distort, prisms that bend views and triangulate trajectories. His delicate assemblages and ingenious constructions demonstrate an awareness of the materiality and of the performance of the instruments. His patience and inimitable tooling convince us of the precision, appropriateness and responsivity of his architecture.

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