Ground fragments

A vocabulary of textures

 

design research

Kostas Manolidis, 2011-12

 

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A series of over 100 small handmade drawings attempt to explore the structural vocabulary of diverse landscape features developed by traditional practices of land cultivation and their adaptation to topography. In large parts of Greece the undulated geomorphology results in disorderly mosaics of agrarian uses. Land-folds, ravines and streams impose a fragmentary, discontinuous and irregular development of arable fields. The depicted patterns of this project were assembled through an intuitive understanding of the latent organization and broken rhythms of such farming modes as well as of other types of ground conditions.

Terrain formations, stone wall networks, excavations, curved salt pans, weathered rock surfaces and any kind of marks inscribed on earth’s surface are regarded as a consistent system of forms being in a dynamic state of disintegration and separation. All of these divergent forms are specified by the process of fragmentation that inevitably determines the destiny of the ground. The fragments generated by this process establish societies with their own fragile cohesion and fabric, in other words they create textures. Their complex kaleidoscopic configurations allow us to perceive the fundamental correlation of order and chaos which regulates the inner architecture of the ground.