REDISCOVERING

THE ISLAND

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Rediscovering the Island

RESEARCH led DESIGN

MArchD - P30032

LIASKOVITI ILEANA NIKI 11032423

30.04.2012

by

‘ This Research-led-Design Project is presented to the School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University inpart fulfilment of the regulations for the Master in Archi-tectural Design. ’

‘Statement of Originality This Research-led-Design Project is an original piece of work which is madeavailable for copying with permission of the Head of the School of Architecture.’

Signed .........………………

CONTENTS

Prologue 10

1 Exploration on a field study 16

2 Nissology the science of islands 40

3 Archaeology ruins of architecture tracing the footprint 48

4 Geology landform building and geography 58

Epilogue 72

Bibliography 74

Figures 79

Acknowledgements 83

PROLOGUELe précurseur c’est l’homme de savoir dont on sait seulement bien après lui qui a couru devant. . . .[A precursor is someone of whom we only know after that he came before. . . .](Canguilhem, 1968, p.22)

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For this project I daringly entitle myself as the architect-explorer. The one that rediscovers the present, traces the past, speculates the fu-ture.

What does “land” mean exactly? How do we ex-perience it and perceive it? What kind of knowl-edge do we need to understand it? How archi-tecture affect it and be affected by it?What is the archaeology and what the future of the land? In order for me to get an objective view I ought to explore the remote land. The dislocated ter-ritories and remote wildernesses that lie far from the metropolis and support the mecha-nisations of modern living.Through my pro-ject I wish to research the fertile area between nature,technology and culture, to rediscover the unreal, forgotten and deserted places, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies.The land lies outside the binary opposition of city and nature. From the point of view of na-ture, it is dirty, polluted, compromised and con-sumed. From the city’s point of view, it is rusty, uninteresting, sleepy, backward and provincial.The land logically precedes architecture. Archi-tecture evolves within the field like a historical process within a geological one. Architecture is a possibility within the field but not the only one, not the primary one.

The land is where we live,where we used to live and where we aim to live. Land is the city and the expansion of the city and sprawl and untouched territories and trash and buildings and old villages and some more buildings. In fact, from mountains, deserts, jungles and even large areas of mechanized agriculture/mining with little human personnel, every-thing is field: East Java, northern Italy,valley of Mexico, Flanders, greater São Paulo. Land implies process and change, not form. It can-not be designed and controlled as a totality but instead must be projected into the future and allowed to grow over time.

“Some designers in Europe, have been thinking landscapes as infrastructures for development. They are designing the site first. It is like designing the blanket first and then laying out the picnic. The methodology often involves unravelling the geo-logical and cultural history of the site. A set of specific characteristics and times of the site/land-scape are identified, respected and heightened in the new development. In this way the architecture can be made more site-specific, more grounded in a place, more cultured and more civic.” (San Rocco, 2011, p.82)

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CA

SA MALAPARTE

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There is a famous story about the Casa Malaparte (fig.1) on the island of Capri: Malaparte recounts how Erwin Rom-mel visited the remote house in 1942 before the battle of El Alamein. He asked the writer if he had bought his house ready-made or designed it himself. Pointing toward the sea, Malaparte replied that the house had been there, but he had designed the landscape. “Any work of architecture, before it is an object, is a transformation of the landscape.” (Tala-mona ,1992,p.41)

Bounded by water, discrete islands arguably constitute a natural geographical model for the classic territorial con-ception of a state. In geology, islands, are peaks of moun-tains, part of a shifting landscape. Their terrain, with a com-plex morphology of layers of history , an archaeology, is a topography of generation.

“Geneology is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary. It oper-ates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.” (Foucault, 1999,p.369)

previous page fig.1 Casa Malaparte (Uknown)

EXPLORATION on a field study

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As I have already mentioned, the title of the architect-Explorer gives me the opportunity to architecturally rediscover the present, mark out the origins and estimate a future scenario of the island. In order to achieve that I had the task to accom-plish a site visit and carry out a field study of a certain place. The study refers to the Mediter-ranean Sea region, where for centuries elevat-ed levels of human mobility have resulted in a principal cultural characteristic. Thanks to its privileged geographical position, the Mediterra-nean has been home to various migratory flows that differ in terms of origins, destinations and nature. These flows have either arrived and set-tled or have come and gone, leaving their trace on the land behind for future generations to re-discover. Matvejevic (1998,) writes: “Nothing reveals the destiny of the Mediterranean better than its island. […] These islands are never with-out dramatic events of universal importance. History does not ignore them and often finds its epilogue in them. In other cases, it is here that history begins.”Islands have always been nodes of contact and exchange within the network of flows of the sys-tem of communication which considers the

sea as a solid medium, “a liquid plateau” (Brau-del,1997, p.23) to be travelled and crossed. Is-lands are stages of longer routes which retain physical traces much more than the mainland.

Matvejevic (1998) writes: “The approach to the islands is characterised by various paradoxes. Some highlight a sort of singularity or irregular-ity […] Darwin’s approach is exactly the oppo-site: when the Beagle dropped the anchor off the coast of the Galapagos Islands, the author of the Origin of Species began to draw up general laws using the data collected in its particular site.”

What is emphasised by the islands is their capac-ity of being representational. Isolation is consid-ered a necessary condition to better define com-plex phenomena and the island is considered a cell, which is analysed in the same way that bi-ologists analyse cells reconstructing the history of an organism. Likewise through the observa-tion of the isolated territory of the cell, the aim is to define processes and situations that belong to the mainland as well as making it react with particular phenomena, i.e the various forms of human mobility.

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My selected site is an uninhabited islet of the southeastern Mediterranean, dubbed for this study as “The Island”, a location which came un-der my attention because of its geologically and archaeologically mobile terrain. My discoveries were fascinating.

As a methodological approach, “field work based on participant observation is well es-tablished as the defining method of data collection”(McGowan, 2011, p.7). Field work has been an epistemological approach for geol-ogy, archaeology and architecture. It is a method I use for my island exploration. From an anthropological view, in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute: Landscape, Violence and Social Bodies: Ritualized Architecture in a Solomon Islands Society, Thomas (2001, p.545) considers the interplay between the bodily expe-rience of landscape and the formation of sociali-ty. The authors investigate the social experiences of landscape in nineteenth-century Roviana La-goon in the Solomon Islands. They deal specifi-cally with the ritualised architecture of a fortifi-cation on Nusa Roviana Island. Drawing on oral tradition and archaeological and historical data, they argue that the architectural remains reflect a powerful mode of shaping

social experience and notions of personhood in the manipulation of ideology. The Roviana landscape creates a world in which genealogical lines are sedimented to place, and practices of ritual violence and head-hunting are made to ap-pear necessary and natural. Paying attention to both oral and material history allows a greater understanding of the ways in which such social structures are reproduced and adds to the con-struction of a rich historical anthropology. Brad-ley (2000, p.35) writes: “Natural places have an archaeology because they acquired a significance in the minds of people in the past. […] one way of recognising the importance of these locations is through the evidence of human activity that is discovered there.”

Another interesting research program entitled Desertmed (2010), aimed to investigate the es-sence of the deserted condition relative to the islands of the Mediterranean. Through research the participants identified approximately 200 is-lands where the natural development of a social fabric is not viable. At present, human settle-ment is made impossible for a variety of reasons.An essential aspect of the work of Desertmed is the use of a wide range of media forms in repre-senting the island regions. On the one hand they serve to research the history of particular

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islands. On the other, every found image makes a statement about the multi-faceted uses and complex political, economic, and societal con-ditions of the Mediterranean region. The visu-alisation of the locations visited plays an impor-tant role. Imaging methods are often the only way to access remote regions. The collection encompasses greatly simplified antiquarian im-ages to complex GpS real time maps, which, for example, depict the movement of ships around the Mediterranean. These serve both scientific as well as military purposes.

On quite different circumstances, at the Kuril Islands scientists are trying to figure out the is-lands inhospitableness. Ben Fitzhugh, Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, led an international team of an-thropologists, archaeologists, geologists, and earth and atmospheric scientists, in a study of past human habitation on the Kuril Islands. They’ve found that despite the often occurring natural disasters, people who left the settle-ments eventually returned. Professor Fitzhugh (2009) explains:“We want to identify the limits of adaptability, or how much resilience people have. We’re looking at the islands as a yardstick of humans’ capacity to colonize and sustain themselves.”

For the reason that I aim to study the genera-tional layers of the island (land) I adopt a spe-cial narrative and writing style. By creating a semi fictional story gives me the opportunity to speculate scenarios or relive the past. The key el-ement of my narrative is that I try to avoid speci-fying chronology and places as I aim to make vague of what past, present and future is. In cre-ating an situation that makes any attempt at dis-tinguishing between ´fact´, ´falsity´ and ´fiction´ impossible, I focus attention on the illogical yet persistent practice of trying to distinguish, de-fine and categorise the world in relation to em-pirical notions of truth.

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Island visit

My expedition took place from January 17th to January 21st, at the location with the exact co-ordinates 36°58’N 24°59’E . Because of it being low season and the extreme weather conditions, boat schedules were not regular resulting in my first major island access difficulty.On Tuesday the 17the I took the boat from the mainland to a principal island of the region, close to my selected site. My first goal since I reached the port was to find my vessel to transport to the Island. The weather had suddenly turned windy but this was common for the area.I had sought this strange land with a view to be-ing its discoverer. When I found my sail I had to navigate myself to the Island. During the jour-ney I could feel every motion of the vessel. Re-fraction of water came in contact with undersea slopes of islands as they interacted with swells coming from opposite directions.

“When I was in Spaceland I heard that your sailors have very similar experiences while they traverse your seas and discern island or coast ly-ing on the horizon. The far-off land may have bays, forelands, angles in and out to any num-ber and extent; yet at a distance you see none of these (unless indeed your sun shines bright upon them revealing the projections and retirements by means of light and shade), nothing but a gray unbroken line upon the water”. (Abbott,2002, p.35)

When I finally dragged my boat onto the remote shore it was with the last of my strength (fig.2). I threw down my bag and sat on a rock. I needed a shelter. Common sense said I had to find the area least affect-ed by the weather conditions. My wander through this land had started.

p. 22 clockwisefig.2 Arrival (Authored,2012)fig.3 The Bay (Authored,2012)fig.4 Tent (Authored, 2012)fig.5 Remains (Authored, 2012)

p. 24fig.10 Campsite (Authored,2012)

p.25fig.11 In situ drawings (Authored,2012)

p. 23 clockwisefig.6 Artefacts (Authored, 2012)fig.7 Artefacts #2 (Authored, 2012)fig.8 Artefacts #3 (Authored, 2012)fig.9 Rocks (Authored, 2012)

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I made the decision to settle at a natural formed bay at the southwest part, where waves were calmer and the cold northern wind was blocked by a hill range (fig.4,9). I quickly put up my tent as rain started to fall heavily. I withdrew into it for the night.

In order to be able to explore the layers of gen-erational terrain of the Island I had to work with methodologies borrowed from two main scientific disciplines, geology and archaeology. On Wednesday the 18th I decided to take an ex-periential walk around the island. I had already completed the journey from the port/entrance point to the camp site/shelter. But now I had to cover the remaining significant sites, the perim-eter, the highest point, the geological quarries and the archaeological ruins. Concurrently, by using basic topographic skills I would map the land. (fig.12)I took a journey to the extents of the island. I have recorded what I have seen in drawings and what I have said in writings (fig.11). I have exported many artefacts (fig.5-8) in order to evidence the substance of this place. Yet my drawings are pic-ture postcards of an ever changing world. The artefacts are fossils of their former selves, once displaced from their original setting. Later on during my time back to the mainland I would start the geological analysis of the specimens in order to retrieve information about the profile of the land. The structurally highest levels, in the south and southwest of the island, comprise sev-eral tens of metres of white to yellowish white, fine

grained dolomite marble with thin, folded layers of dark grey, carbonaceous calcite marble.At the ruin site I managed to identify at least two past generations that inhabited the now de-serted land.The Island had a narrative of history and I had to closely examine it. My attention had fallen at the architectural ruins that appeared to be subsequent. The anticipation of ruins mark out the present as the condition of the future. One of the narratological effects of imagining the present in a ruined condition is the strong emphasis that this places on ruins’ relation to the present. How would I retrace these architectural conditions? What if I visualise myself and relive the circumstances where the inhabitants/ inhab-itant of the today-ruin existed?

“Projecting ruins discloses the duration and shape of time and dramatises a conflict between material permanence and material transience. This conflict between continuity and cessation makes the ruin an end that remains, an end that is imperfect, unreliable. The ruin marks that sense of termination that has not quite come to its end. I call this temporal unreliability a nar-ratological effect because imagining the ruins ofthe future gives a means to envision a story that both locates a possible landscape and relates that landscape to present surroundings.” (Viney, 2010) This is not only done in order to imagine what the future might look like but, as we shall see throughout this project, provides an oppor-tunity to re-examine the present.

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fig.12 Cartographying the Island (Athored,2012)

fig.12 Cartographying the Island (Athored,2012)

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fig.13 Explorer (Authored, 2012)

MY SOLITUDE AND EXPLORATION HAS BEGUN

fig.13 Explorer (Authored, 2012)

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The ruin seemed to be remains of a prominent, monumental building, with spaces formed by carved out rocky land formed from dolomite marble and white calcite marble layers. It could be characterised as a landform, like an artificial rock or hilltop, even a quarry. The architecture was moving towards the landscape and the land-scape was moving towards the architecture.I noticed that the antecedent ruins seemed to be already partially excavated, with specimens withdrawn from their original site and relo-cated at the subsequent building. In the dis-cipline of archaeology it is common for large parts of the site to be unexcavated. As much as possible, the aim is to preserve archaeological sites (artefacts, features, associations) for fu-ture study, when they will have new questions and new research methods. In addition to pre-serving sites, it is also important to preserve existing collections of artefacts, documents, research records, and reports that have resulted from archaeological surveys and excavations. Through my inspection I came across objects that seemed to have had a naval use. Nautical instruments- a deconstructed sailboat keel- all seemed to be part of the construction (fig.14). This led me to speculate. The user just before his settling must had navigated himself to these coordinates, on a vessel, as a keen sailorman.A sailor and being an islander seem to share similarities. In one of his writings entitled

Fluid Geography Richard Buckminster Fuller (1946) compared the “sailorman’s and the land-lubber’s forma mentis. Having been trained himself as a mariner in the U.S Navy, Fuller was inclined to praise the sailor’s dynamic proclivity over the static mentality of the landlubber. The latter perceives the earth’s movements in terms of night and day or seasonal cycles, and refers to cardinal points as if they were places. His percep-tion of space is thus eminently Euclidean, linked to local lines of division between fields, regions and states. The sailor on the other hand is chal-lenged by a much more dynamic environment. To give himself a minimum sense of stability on the fluid surface of the sea under the magnified fury of the elements, he had to develop supe-rior sensitivities, skills and technologies. Being constantly in motion, he has no problem in per-ceiving the Earth’s rotation. The kind of space he experiences every day is extensively crossed by lines of connection, by vectors whose length is deformed by parameters of time and weather. Sailors make geography and astronomy work in the same context. Chidoni (2011, p112) writes:“ When Colombus sailed west for the first time, he did not adopt previously recognised routes and was thus unable to identify his position in rela-tion to the vessel’s motion, his boat was virtually still, suspended like an island within extraneous and homogenous context that was something like a blank piece of paper […] new unexplored places and distances were reached-places from

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which nobody had returned to relate their ex-periences and distances that made it impossible to rely on previous navigational systems based on mapped elements, such as the visible coastal landscape and the topography of the seabed.”

However it is one artefact which discovery brought me closer to identifying the sole user of that building. (fig.13)

He was the original Explorer. And he is now the protagonist. There must have been a place for him to collect, exhibit and examine his finds. I have started to notice coincidental common characteristics to our existence on the island. We were both sailors, navigators, geologists, archae-ologists. We were both there to rediscover.

Islands are complex physical spaces and have a special place in the disciplines of human sciences. The Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean played a fundamental role in the de-velopment of Darwinism. Lengthy periods of in-situ investigation made by Charles Dar-win encouraged scientists to believe that they were working in a natural laboratory, uncon-taminated by and protected from mankind thanks precisely to their isolation. They saw the island as a laboratory and/or paradise. In fact, Matvejevic (1998) mentioned: “the consideration of islands is characterised by various paradoxes. Some underline a sort of singularity or irregularity. […] Darwin’s ap-proach is exactly the opposite: when the Bea-gle dropped anchor in front of the Galapagos Islands, the author of The Origin of the Spe-cies drew up general rules, beginning with the data collected in this particular space.”

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fig.14 Sailing Boat (Authored, 2012)

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Exploration, Isolation and the ArcticA case study

Antarctic travel in the early 20th century – the so-called ‘Heroic Era’ of exploration of the con-tinent – was marked by an irony. in the world’s most isolated, expansive region, explorers were constantly subject to crowded, confined condi-tions, cooped up in ships’ holds, huts, tents, and other makeshift structures. Much as like the Ex-plorer of the Island who used drawings and writ-ing to retain his finds and discoveries for the next generation, Heroic-Era explorers marooned on Antarctic islands used the writing and reading of text to deal with the anxieties of extreme isola-tion and confinement. Two well known examples are the Northern Party of Robert F. Scott’s last expedition, forced to live for over six months in an ice cave on Inexpressible Island in 1912; and members of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans- Antarctic (the Endurance) Expedition who lived beneath two upturned boats on Elephant Island for the winter of 1916.

The island settings of these two Heroic-Era ex-peditions are significant. Heroic-Era explorers tended to see themselves as metaphorically in-habiting island space, whether or not they were literally doing so. As Hay (2006,p.27) notes, this is a standard way in which the concept of ‘island’ is deployed metaphorically: “As a ‘category of the mind’, the island’s first and obvious applica-tion is to any segment of a continental landmass characterized by isolation and remoteness”. For example, the men of Douglas Mawson’s Aus-tralasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) lo-cated their main base on the rocky edge of the continent, but their expedition newspaper’s first editorial entitled “Marooned” begins with a comparison between the expedition, the 18th century castaway Alexander Selkirk, and his lit-erary counterpart Robinson Crusoe (McLean, p. 1913). Richard Byrd (1958,p.26), who lived alone in a base on the Ross Ice Shelf in the win-ter of 1934, makes a similar comparison . But focussing on specific, non-metaphorical Antarc-tic islands such as Elephant and Inexpressible allows one to highlight unusual physical char-acteristics which loosely parallel the paradox of simultaneous isolation and over-connectedness experienced by Heroic-Era explorers. Sur-veying recent work within island studies, Hay (2006,p.22-23) notes that paradigms of “hard-edgedness and a consequent insularity” are being replaced by an emphasis on connectedness and the permeability of boundaries.

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fig.15 Endurance (Hurley,1915)

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Historically, the high southern latitudes were fa-mously deceptive when it came to distinguishing land from water, and island from continent. It was not until the 20th century that Antarctica itself, covered as it is by thick ice, was shown incontrovertibly to be a continent rather than an archipelago. Even now that Antarctica’s status is clear, and its coasts and surrounding islands are carefully mapped, it still throws up questions about the nature of islandness. Antarctica is of-ten imagined as a large blank space. According to Manhire (2004,p.20), it is figured as “a bare canvas, a clean slate, a tabula rasa awaiting in-scription and impression”. Perhaps more than anywhere else, Antarctica alerts us to the contingent nature of islands and continents, of connectedness and isolation. The metaphor of the continent-as blank- page might neatly anticipate the territorial conquests of the Heroic Era: and its physical attempts at inscrip-tion. The claustrophobic conditions that Antarctic explorers experienced reached their extreme in sledging expeditions, but to some extent they also characterised daily life in expedition bases. Frank Wild (1937,p.14-15), veteran of four He-roic-Era expeditions, writes that despite the im-pression given by official accounts, “mens tem-pers must naturally become frayed when herded together in close quarters under the trying con-ditions of a Polar winter”.

He describes an incident during Scott’s first expedition when a man became mentally un-hinged, deliberately hiding in the winter drift in an attempt to launch a surprise attack on an-other man using a crowbar. Byrd is famous for deliberately isolating himself in Antarctica for a winter, but his account of this experience shows his awareness that one thing worse than being entirely alone in such an extreme milieu is not being entirely alone. Byrd (1958,p.16) writes:

“In a polar camp, little things … have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity … For there is no escape anywhere. You are hemmed in on every side by your own inadequacies and the crowding measures of your associates”

The first case of exploration is that of Scott’s Northern Party, a group of six men led by Victor Campbell (Lambert, 2002,pp.112-150). Scott made his main base at Cape Evans, Ross Island, and originally intended for Campbell’s group to explore territory to the east. An unexpected encounter with Roald Amundsen led the erst-while ‘Eastern Party’ to change direction, and base themselves north of the main party at Cape Adare in South Victoria Land. After a year of sledging and science, they were picked up at the turn of 1912 by the expedition ship and moved further south to Evans Cove. Here they deport-ed some supplies, and then headed off with their

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tents and sledges to explore further territory before being collected again at the end of sum-mer. However, sea ice prevented the ship’s re-turn, and the men were forced to stay put, with minimal food and shelter, on an island 7 miles long and half a mile wide (11.2km by 0.8km), bound on the east by sea or sea ice, depending on the season, and on the west by two continen-tal glaciers. They named the island Inexpressible (Lambert, 2002,p.114).They managed to survive the dark, freezing con-ditions of winter by building a snow cave and liv-ing on seal and penguin meat, until they could make the dangerous journey back to the main hut the following spring. The cave was 3m x 4m in area, with an average height of 168cm. None of the men could have stood up straight in it. The entrance was so low that some of the men had to crawl through. Just inside was a latrine area, where the men, who suffered from chronic diarrhoea, spent much time uncomfortable mo-ments. The walls quickly became stained black by smoke from a blubber stove used for cooking; blubber lamps provided their only light.Famously (or infamously), Campbell observed naval hierarchies by identifying an imaginary line through the cave dividing the three crew mem-bers from the two officers and the scientist; the men implicitly agreed that what was spoken on one side could not be heard on the other (Camp-bell, 1988,p.29).

The men were also, of course, writing; the previ-ous year, living relatively comfortably in a hut at Cape Adare, they had produced their own ‘news-paper’” (another imaginary means of connection to the outside world) but now their primary outlet was their diaries. In these, the men wrote not only reflections on their experience, but also their original poetry and quotations from books that they thought apposite or wanted to remem-ber. One of the most avid diarists was Priestley. During the first year at Cape Adare, he not only made extensive diary entries, he then produced typed copies, editing as he went. These diaries in turn became reading material for the group in the second winter: Priestley would read them aloud along with the Dickens chapter, and the men would become nostalgic about their life in the hut the previous winter (particularly the meals). Johnson and Suedfeld (1996,p.49) note that isolation in polar expeditions “could some-times be alleviated symbolically, by mail from home”. Without any chance of this kind of con-nection, the men in the ice cave effectively sent mail to themselves by listening to Priestley’s year-old observations. Later, Priestley incorpo-rated parts of his diaries into his published ac-count of the experience,Antarctic Adventure, and they now sit in the Scott Polar Research Institute, pored over by researchers like myself.

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The diaries thus evolved from private reflection, to a source of shared reminiscence, to public re-cord, just as David Copperfield evolved from a source of individual pleasure to a shared narra-tive which kept the group buoyed from day to day.Similar in many ways to the experiences of Scott’s Northern Party, but far more famous, is the Elephant Island episode of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition. Shackleton intended to cross the Antarctic continent, but his ship be-came trapped by ice in the Weddell Sea before he could begin this attempt, and for many months remained a little wooden island amid fields of ice. After the ship was spectacularly crushed, the 28 men dragged their supplies,debris and three boats across the sea-ice and occupied likely-looking floes, hoping they would drift closer to land. By the time they spotted Elephant Island, they were living on what Shackleton (2001,p.9) terms a “steadily dwindling” “floating cake of ice”. The island, a mountainous, glacier-covered out-crop off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, 38km by 19km at its widest (Stewart, 1990,1.199), was more stable than the floe but only margin-ally more hospitable. Shackleton and five others soon left in one of the boats in a desperate bid to reach help at another far-off island, South Geor-gia. The other 22 men stayed put for the winter, living under the two remaining boats, unsure when or if they would be rescued.

Like Campbell’s men, the Elephant Is-landers were also avid writers. Lees (Thomson,2003,pp.250-251) kept a detailed di-ary, remarking in it that “One might think that there was nothing to write about when one is leading such an inert life as ours, but I find that one does such a lot of thinking that the trouble is to eliminate the purely conjectural matter”. Dia-ries not only contained reflections and descrip-tions they also served as a forum for creativity. Hurley used his to record a number of topical verses he composed during his time on the is-land, including “Our Home on Elephant Isle”. Such poems and songs were significant tension releases for polar expeditioners. Lees observes candidly in his diary that “It is only natural that one should occasionally get a bit fed up with one another, considering our fearful congestion” (Thomson,2003,p.239). Lees was both annoyed and relieved by texts. The community used them to express disapproval of his behaviour, while he used them to express private thoughts and opinions. In the case of his hidden book, Lees retained a means of imaginative escape that was his alone.The experiences of the men marooned on Inex-pressible and Elephant Islands highlight the mul-tiple uses and purposes of writing in expedi-tions. The upkeep of a diary was multi-purpose. At the base level, it was an important practical component of polar exploration, providing a re

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cord of events for later reference. Another obvi-ous purpose was to allow the writer to vent his feelings, to express the frustration, depression or despair that couldn’t be spoken aloud. Yet dia-ries could also be public – Priestley’s is clearly written with an eye to consumption by others, and he eventually used it as a way to sustain his companions’ emotional needs as well as his own. Text acted like ice in Heroic-Era expeditions, at times insulating expedition members from those around them, calving off little imaginative islands on which they could maroon themselves and at other times solidifying the gaps between them.

NISSOLOGY the science of islands

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I S L A N D S C I E N C E

“Islands – real islands, real geographical entities – at-tract affection, loyalty, identification. And what do you get when you take a bounded geographical entity and add an investment of human attachment, loyalty and meaning? You get the phenomenon known as ‘place’. Is-lands are places – special places, paradigmatic places, topographies of meaning in which the qualities that construct place are dramatically distilled” (Hay, 2006,p. 31).

The pursuit of nissology, or island studies, calls for a recentering of focus from mainland to island, away from the discourse of conquest of mainlanders, giving voice and platform for the expression of island narratives. Yet, exploring is-lands on their own terms, in spite of its predilec-tion for authenticity, is fraught with epistemo-logical and methodological difficulties. I need to investigate this science of islands in order to be able to thoroughly understand how the Explorer made use of it and perceived it. Islands are well known as settings for research on isolated flora, fauna and cultures (notably Darwin’s Galapa-gos and Mead’s Samoa). They have, in addition strongly featured in fiction for many centuries, particularly since Robinson Crusoe’s (DeFoe, 1719) shipwreck on a remote island.

In both cases – scientific and fictional alike – storytelling has been a significant element of how islands, islandness and their importance are conveyed. Islands have been treated as laborato-ries to test theoretical propositions in continen-tal disciplines. Gillis (2004,p.107) notes that “it was not that science was interested in the islands for themselves. The appeal of islands lay more in the fact that … they would serve as easily com-prehended stand-ins for the whole natural and human world”. For example, biogeographical studies on islands played a key role in evolution-ary theory as MacArthur and Wilson (1967,p. 3) mention “An island is certainly an intrinsi-cally appealing study object. It is simpler than a continent or an ocean, a visibly discrete object that can be labelled with a name and its resident populations identified thereby … By their very multiplicity, and variation in shape, size, degree of isolation, and ecology, islands provide the necessary replications in natural “experiments” by which evolutionary hypotheses can be tested”

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I S L A N D L I T E R A T U R E

An island is a bit of earth that has broken faith with the terrestrial world. This quite naturally gives rise to concern about the reliability and good will of these landforms, which have so clearly turned back on geographical solidarity. “[...] Creeping anxiety along these lines likely accounts in some measure for the prominence of islands in the robust literatures of betrayal, soli-tude, madness, and despair. One is abandoned on islands (Ariadne, Philoctetes), trapped on them (Odysseus, repeatedly), and subjected thereup-on to the whims of lunatics (e.g.the islands of doctors No and Moreau)” (Diaz, 2010,p.90).

There is history and development of books about islands in western culture. Islands are prominent in Homer’s Odyssey, and Plato’s Island of Atlantis is perhaps the most famous mythical island of all time. The Greeks were the first to develop the island-book as such, but Roman writers showed much less interest in insular themes.From the importance of islands in the travels of Marco Polo and John of Mandeville, the rise of the Isolario, illustrated with maps, to the emer-gence of the Robinsonade.

Homer’s Odyssey begins not only in mediis rebus, in the middle of the action, but also in medio oceano, with Odysseus on the isle of Ogygia in the middle of the sea , love-prisoner of the god-dess Calypso who lives in a cave while he longs to complete his journey home. Later we learn that Odysseus visited many exotic islands before reaching Calypso’s, including the floating island of Aeolus, King of the winds, who tied the winds in a bag for Odysseus to speed his voyage home. The island of the goddess Circe, who turned his men into pigs and told Odysseus how to reach the Underworld and the island of the Sirens, who sing a song so beautiful that sailors are ir-resistibly drawn to the shore and are content to die listening to the song, rather than seeking to escape or even bothering to eat. Before return-ing home Odysseus will visit Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians , who have little contact with the outside world, lead an easy life with lots of changes of clothes and warm baths , and have magic ships which they row faster than a hawk can fly without pilots , for the ships know them-selves the course they are to trace, doing so without danger of shipwreck .

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The Travels of John Mandeville, also known as The Book of Sir John Mandeville, was com-posed between 1357 and 1371 and purports to describe Mandeville’s extravagant adventures in Asia. In fact, the author of the book probably never traveled himself and his stories are mostly derived from other travel books. However, the book was one of the most popular of the Mid-dle Ages, and survives in more than 250 manu-scripts.

The Florentine Cristoforo Buondelmonti (c. 1430) went to Rhodes in 1415 to learn Greek, travel the Greek isles, and purchase ancient Greek manuscripts for patrons back in Florence. A lively and curious man, Buondelmonti ex-plored the ruins on each island he visited to see if they corresponded with descriptions of build-ings he had read in classical authors, particularly Ovid, Virgil, Pliny, and Plutarch. He also drew a map of each island. Sometime before 1420, he wrote a Liber insularum archipelagi (Book of the Islands of the Greek Archipelago), dedicat-ed to the powerful Cardinal Jordano Orsini—probably an attempt to advance his career in the church. The work was very popular and survives in more than sixty manuscripts. In his book Buondelmonti gives accounts of seventy-two islands in the Aegean. His approach is straight-forward: he names the chief ports and towns of each island, the highest mountains, the best land and springs, and offers some remarks about the island’s history in classical mythology.

Buondelmonti’s great innovations were his con-cern with the present topography of the islands, and also his inclusion of a map of every island. The presence of maps with the first-hand de-scription of an area was a multimedia revolu-tion; the Liber insularum archipelagi was very popular throughout the 15th century, and de-fined a new genre: the isolario, or cartograph-ic island book. Henricus Martellus Germanus created the next surviving isolario, which was titled Insularium illustratum; it is known from a few surviving manuscripts and follows Buon-delmonti’s model closely. Working in Florence with the map-engraver and publisher Francesco Rosselli, Martellus was probably commissioned to create this isolario because of his talent as a mappainter and his expertise in the new Italian humanist script.

Daniel Defoe wrote his novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, which he published in 1719, locating a tale to the western Atlantic, an unnamed island near the mouth of the Orinoco river, and greatly ex-tending the protagonist’s stay on the island to 28 years . For Defoe, the challenges of surviving on an island were a milieu for demonstrating the power of a resourceful and educated individual to control his environment and to create from raw materials everything necessary for exist-ence, to conquer the world through human la-bor and science.

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fig.16 Robinson Crusoe (Unknown)

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Defoe thus created a new genre of island book, the Robinsonade, which is very well suited to modern western individualism, and the genre continues to be practised today.However, ac-cording to Mackay (2010,p.438) in “Robinson Crusoe all the essential problems of the philo-sophical island are brought together.” In his 1946 essay Causes and Reasons of Desert Is-lands, Gilles Deleuze, looks at the problem of Robinson Crusoe. He says “ Defoe’s narrative fails the profound sense of the reinvention of mythology that characterises the philosophical island.”

G.K. Chesterton, on 1903 in a piece entitled The Philosophy of Islands, remarks on the very hu-man need to identify things, and sees at the root of this a wish to isolate. It is this desire that he links both what he calls the “perennial poetry of islands” and the “the perennial poetry of ships” (p.358): “A ship like the Argo is valued by the mind because it is an island, because, that is, it carries with it, floating loose on the desolate ele-ments, the resources, and rules and trades, be-cause it has ranks and the whole clinging like a few limpets to a lost spar.”

The contemporary island can no longer pander to the desire of isolation, because we know our word is complex and interconnected.

Author and artist Charles Avery, who has been documenting his impossibly detailed discoveries of a new island through The Islanders, a fictional travelogue which catalogues a place called ‘The Island’ as encountered by the book’s narrator. His protagonist comes to the island with a view to being its discoverer and craves the glory of discovering something new. The fantasy of the Victorian explorer is already dispelled on page one of Avery’s travelogue.

Someone who explores a land that seems, to him, to come directly from the deepest part of himself and to contain the strangest thoughts. But he constantly has to accept that others have been there before him, already mapped, chart-ed, and named these zones of thought.Mackay (2010, p.436) writes: “ To think today is to negotiate an historical constellation of thought-positions; anamnesis become histori-cal. It is the problem, not of how to begin from nothing, but of how to synthesise existing, mul-tiple lines of thought into something new.”

“Geographers say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for the imagination because it confirms what the imagination already knew. Nor is it the only case where science makes mythology more concrete, and mythology makes science more vivid.” (Deleuze, 2002, p.9)

fig.17 Island (Avery, 2008)

ARCHAEOLOGY ruins of architecture tracing the footprint

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The design research exploration began with a simple interest in the idea that nothing is static, that in nature there is an element of constant change, a relentless updating of the present con-dition. The project seeks to investigate architec-ture as the most guilty of resisting this inevitable change. Me, the third generation on the Island by drawing on the archaeological and historical data, I argue that the architectural remains re-flect a powerful mode of shaping experience and notions of personhood in the manipulation of ideology. How does such an architecture begin to interact with the past, applying its transfor-mations and operations to its site, its narratives and fictions?

It is certainly a worthy question to ask why the Island is such an attractive place to study for the Scientist. It is suggested that the geographi-cal precision of an island is part of what makes it unique and amenable for study, and that the notion of a boundary is key to an island’s exist-ence and identity. From an archaeological per-spective, Patrick Kirch (1986,p.2) two decades ago noted that the “essence of islands is discrete-ness, that is, their bounded and circumscribed nature”. These observations mirror what Colin Renfrew (2004,pp.276-278) noted was part of the at-traction of islands to geologists, archaeologists, and people in general – that they tend to “feel” remote, often requiring a journey that involves separation from somewhere else.

Regardless, it is clear that there are many differ-ent beliefs as to what makes ‘islandness’ a phe-nomenon worth investigating.

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One of the major goals of archaeology is to ex-amine how human societies evolved culturally over time. Archaeology as a discipline, in fact, is the only one specialized in providing a deep temporal snapshot of what was happening to hu-mans in the past . As part of my work on the Island, I am interested in how the Scientist de-veloped certain seafaring skills, became suscep-tible to the effects of (or possibly even encour-aged) isolation, interacted across the seascape, and adapted to and transformed newly encoun-tered environments, among many other things. Although some of these issues may not be neces-sarily exclusive to the Island, the effects of re-moteness and isolation, whether discouraging or encouraging interaction, are amplified in impor-tance when one considers that the Scientist had to cross larger seas and oceans using some type of watercraft to reach it and would have been out of contact for long periods of time – weeks, months, or even years.

As Irwin (1999,p.252) succinctly stated:

“ … landlubber archaeology has remained large-ly ignorant about prehistoric seafaring and paid little attention to the ocean as a contextual vari-able. While field archaeology necessarily takes place on land, except in the case of shipwrecks, some important developments in prehistory took place at sea.”

In the Island I came across ruins of different ages.An architectural ruin can be said to be the physical documentation of a transformative pro-cess - one that may have played out over cen-turies or millenia. Because of this the ruin has a particularly strong connection with time and time past - it is proof that the present is not the only instance which exists or has existed - ruins provide physical evidence of origin and lineage, an inheritance of knowledge uncovered and pre-served.From English poetry to Palladian draw-ings, the fascination, sympathy or even nostal-gia for ruins pervades architectural history. As seen in Giuseppe Galli Bibiena’s “A Funeral Hall in the Ruins of the Colosseum,” architectural ruins are often expressed as sharing the same tragic ultimatum as the men who created them. What interests me here is the idea that architecture has an inherent mortality which has an intimate con-nection with our own human experience, that no matter how strong, large or grand a building may be, it will one day inevitably become a ruin - it cannot resist time.

The research exists to seek out an architecture of transformation, of which the passing of time, the wear and erosion of materials and site, and the change of meaning and program are considered as a continuum. Such an architecture is one that understands its placement, role and responsibil-ity in relation to the past, present and future.

fig.18. Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in the Louvre in Ruins (Robert,1796)

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The research might treat the Island as simply a point of arrival that can be mined for its own existing collection of narratives and transforma-tions, from which the intervention will begin to apply its existence and influence, in a way that attempts to be more than just a footprint or bookmark in time, but instead taps the true nature of the site by becoming synergistic with its context and the passing of time, as opposed to resisting it. It is this dichotomy, between time as inevitable linear decay, and time as a condition to be ordered, controlled, or projected into, that fascinates me about existing in the present.

Viney (2010) says “confronting the future in ruins is by no means a formulaic exercise. The interpretative gaps that energise the exigency of this form of waste are motivated by the ir-resolvable questions they raise.” Particularly in their painterly and cinematic manifestations, the ruins of the future frequently leave out how or when or for what reason these structures have reached their terminal condition. For instance, in the paintings of Hubert Robert (fig.18) and Joseph Gandy (fig.19) we are given no explicit explanation for why the structures they depict have fallen into ruin; their visual impact plays upon the disjuncture felt between the building existent and the future ruin represented.

Manaugh (2005), mentions the term “urban fossil value” in order to describe a situation on Millions of years from now, where in geographical regions “entombed by tectonic disturbances,” entire cities – “the abandoned foundations, subways, roads and pipelines of our ever more extensive urban stratum” – will actually come to form “future trace fossils.” It is often remarked in architectural circles how megalomaniacal Nazi architect Albert Speer came up with his so-called theory of ruin value, in which he proposed a new Romano-Fascist Berlin de-signed to look good as a ruin in thousands of years. A more recent example of intended ruins are the planned warning signs for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain (fig.20), which are intended to endure for 10,000 years, and yet still convey an enduring impression on future gen-erations.

fig.19 Bank of England (Gandy, 1830)

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fig.20 Tunnel-boring machine at Yucca Mountain reaches daylight (U.S. Department of Energy)

fig.20 Tunnel-boring machine at Yucca Mountain reaches daylight (U.S. Department of Energy)

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In order to trace the architectural archaeological footprint of the Ex-plorer, I first need to investigate his scientific finds and speculate from the archaeology of the first generation.Lithological comparisons between building stones of a sanctuary on the Island and geological units mapped on this island enabled a distinction to be made between locally derived and possibly imported material.

fig.21 Laboratory of Nissology Plan trace (Authored,2012)

RETRACING THE RUINS PLAN

GEOLOGY landform building and geography

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“If mere survival, mere continuance, is of interest, then the harder sorts of rocks, such as granite, have to be put at the top of the list as the most successful, have to put at the top of the list as the most successful among macroscopic entities...But the rocks’s way of staying in the game is different from the way of living things. The rock, we may say resists change, it stays put, unchang-ing. The living thing escapes change either by correct-ing change or changing itself to meet change or by incorporating change into its own being.” (Bateson, 1995, p.77)

Land is in a state of continual self-updating. Charles Lyell (1830, p.147) in his seminal book The Principles of Geology, describes landscapes as “ monuments of ancient mutations in the earth’s crust.” everything is dynamic and tempo-rary, processes flowing one into the other. Lyell writes:“The renovating as well as the destroying causes are unceasingly at work, the repair of land being as constant as its decay and the deepening of the seas keeping pace with formation of shoals.”

Architecture lies between the living and the geo-logical. It is slower than the any living creature but faster that the rocks underneath. Resistance and change are both at work in the land: the hardness of the rock and the easy adaptability of living things.

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Artificial Mountains is the primary form of land-form building. The most expression of the idea of shaping a fragment of the landscape into a higher level of order. Like Adolf Loos (1910,p.24) has written “ If we find a mound in the forest, six feet long and three feet wide, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and some-thing in us says, ‘Someone lies buried here.’ This is Architecture.” Sigfried Giedon(1971,pp.2-6) in his late work Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition, maps out the progression from the sculptural presence of the Doric temple in the landscape, to the hol-lowing out of space made possible by the Roman masonry vault, to the dynamic space-time con-ceptions of modernism. Contemporary landform projects turn Giedon’s linear narrative around. They function, like the Doric temple or the zig-gurat, as “space-emanating objects”. They gather in and orient the space of the landscape around them, not as simple sculptural solids but as com-plex objects creating new relationships between inside and outside. Much alike is the Laboratory of Nissology. The landscape it confronts is no longer the raw Mediterranean countryside but a hybrid of nature and science.

fig.22 Valley of the Kings (Unknown)

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Manaugh (2010), mentions: “Viollet-le-Duc’s work on Mont Blanc introduces a new edge to geological discourse in architecture as compared to the painterly outlook of John Ruskin. Now, observations of tectonic forms not only served to see nature intensely but also, and mainly, to identify a structural logic to its complex mor-phology. A basic principle thus organizes Viollet-le-Duc’s analysis of the great massif: The appar-ent chaos of its outline is only an illusion, as “laws have ordered these forms and determined the great crystalline system.”

Viollet-le-Duc as an architectural theorist ac-companies his descriptions with numerous dia-grams and sketches, illustrating the crystalline structure of the rocks, the mode of their disin-tegration and the effects of drifts and torrents.

As much as the Explorer used the island as a research site and a personal laboratory, that is how Viollet-le-Duc considers Mont Blanc. As he says (1877, p.1) : “The traveller who reaches an altitude exceeding 6000 feet above the level, might suppose that the regions he was traversing were soltudes, immobility, and deat perpertual-ly reign. […] in these vast elevated laboratories man is an intruder.”

fig.23 Mont Blanc (Viollet-le-Duc,1877)fig.24 Mont Blanc 2 (Viollet-le-Duc,1877)

fig.23 Mont Blanc (Viollet-le-Duc,1877)fig.24 Mont Blanc 2 (Viollet-le-Duc,1877)

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Viollet-le-Duc’s work was a strong influence to Spanish architect Vicente Guallart who’s inter-est lies on contrasting architecturally new hills and coastlines based on a logical study of the ge-ometry of rocks Guallart (2009), describes his project Howtomakeamountain:

“The limestone of the hill and its rhombic crys-tals of calcite enabled us to conceive, at multi-ple scales, a crystalline genesis for the project. A coherent system, from the structure itself to its outer limit, that responds to a single system of crystallization. In this way, the skin, like soil in the hills, directly reflects the internal logic of the mass and its interaction with the environ-ment. In this case, the rhombic system generates a hexagonal geometry that will be the geometric base of the ‘gene’ (a hexagonal micro-topogra-phy that can be combined all over its faces) that will initiate the process of constructing the skin. This gene will set in motion the re-generation of the hill.”

Viollet-le-Duc not only employed geological concepts and methods, but also practicing as a geographer in documenting natural phenomena. Such efforts that speak of connections between architecture and geography specifically, and ar-chitecture and science more deeply, extend well into the 20th century with Buckminster Fuller’sdevelopment of the Dymaxion projection of the Earth.

Fuller realized a new image of the classical hu-manist concept that buildings and world could be conflated in a single cartographic system.

fig.25 Dymaxion Map (Fuller,1943)

fig.25 Dymaxion Map (Fuller,1943) fig.26 Howtomakeamountain (Guallart)

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fig.27 Entering the Island-Entering the Laboratory (Authored,2012)

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fig.28 Geology of the Laboratory (Authored,2012)

GEOLOGY OF THE LAB

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fig.29 Inside the Island-Inside the Lab (Authored,2012)

fig.29 Inside the Island-Inside the Lab (Authored,2012)

EPILOGUE

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The island was my subject of research, my own personal scientific laboratory. It is a para-digmatic place of study in which qualities are heightened, their essence distilled, and their meanings sharpened. The primary limited re-source of any island is the ground. The fact that they are a circumscribed space is also a charac-teristic that allows us to define land.They are hot spots of territorial changes, out-posts of what will be in the future in the main-land in different times. As fragments they are the product of the erosion of a continent. They are the ruins of what previously contained them. Choosing the island as a physical place to describe, explore, measure, and interpret it was a result of a conviction, a need and an ob-session.

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FIGURES

fig.1 Uknown, Casa Malaparte , Available at: http://sloosh.tumblr.com/post/19646117311/casa-malaparte (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.2 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Arrival

fig.3 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), The Bay

fig.4 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Tent

fig.5 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Remains

fig.6 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Artefacts

fig.7 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Artefacts #2

fig.8 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Artefacts #3

fig.9 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Rocks

fig.10 Liaskoviti, I.N.(2012), Campsite

fig.11 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012), In situ drawings

fig.12 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012), Cartographing the Island

fig.13 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012), Explorer

fig.14 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012), Sailing Boat

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fig.15 Hurley,(1915) Endurance available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Endurance_Final_Sinking.jpg (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.16 Unknown, Robinson Crusoe available at: http://www.endici.co.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuild-erpictures/Sets/IMGP1235.JPG (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.17 Avery, C. (2008) Island available at: http://artpulsemagazine.com/wp-content/up-loads/2009/10/charles-avery.gif (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.18 Robert, H. (1796) Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in the Louvre in Ruins available at: http://com-mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubert_Robert_-_Imaginary_View_of_the_Grande_Galerie_in_the_Louvre_in_Ruins_-_WGA19589.jpg (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig. 19 Gandy, J. (1830) Bank of England available at: http://thisisrealarchitecture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/entropy-designs.html (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.20 U.S. Department of Energy, Tunnel-boring machine at Yucca Mountain reaches daylight available at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/4069467214/sizes/o/ (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.21 Liaskoviti, I.N (2012) Laboratory of Nissology Plan trace (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.22 Unknown, Valley of the Kings, available at: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_MY8N2x00TKE/TRE5wcPi-7FI/AAAAAAAAOac/_zj-t2-ca80/s1600/scan0078.jpg (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.23 Viollet-le-Duc, E. (1877) Mont Blanc available at: http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?num=10&um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1173&bih=611&tbs=isz:l&tbm=isch&tbnid=MCjwfuM7dhRUeM:&imgrefurl=http://comm02.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/mont-blanc/&docid=HRAuXfVhnyFYDM&imgurl=http://comm02.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/n5400922_pdf_1_-1dm-224.jpg&w=3221&h=4184&ei=AaufT-uHNIGL8gOD2KyqAQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=87&vpy=145&dur=2461&hovh=256&hovw=197&tx=97&ty=114&sig=106041122370105138202&sqi=2&page=1&tbnh=119&tbnw=90&start=0&ndsp=23&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:70 (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.24 Viollet-le-Duc, E. (1877) Mont Blanc 2 available at: http://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2010/02/architecture-mont-blanc-and-eventually-sand.html (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

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fig.25 Fuller,B.R (1943) Dymaxion Map available at: http://socks-studio.com/2011/05/08/dymaxion-map-by-michael-paukner/ (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.26 Guallart, V. (2005) Howtomakeamountain available at:http://www.guallart.com/05howToMakeAMountain/default.htm (Accessed: 22 April 2012)

fig.27 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012) Entering the Island-Entering the Laboratory

fig.28 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012) Geology of the Laboratory

fig.29 Liaskoviti, I.N. (2012) Inside the Island-Inside the Lab

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanking:

My family for being always there.

My tutor for inspiring me and motivating me.

My classmates and friends for sharing ideas and moments.

REDISCOVERING

THE ISLAND

LIASKOVITI ILEANA NIKI