Edge Town offers an alternative vision of city-limit living. Rather than turning an envious eye towards the city
center, or pretending to rural isolation, Edge Town residents inhabit an exhilarating version of suburbia by
embracing the unique characteristics of their frontier site.
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
Orbiting London, driving in and out of the city limits, we have become enthusiastic connoisseurs of the
landscapes created where open country rubs up against pockets of suburbia and the extremities of the city's
transit networks. In terms of scale, texture and animation, these places are unique. They contain unregulated
tracts of land, put to eclectic use, which present intriguing vistas full of brutal thresholds. And although
these can feel lonely places, removed from the city proper, they are populated (albeit transiently) by the
thousands of people who daily speed through them in their vehicles. But what happens if you leave your
vehicle? Outside our car – unshielded, un-power-assisted – exploring hard shoulders, climbing
motorway embankments, standing under flight paths, we found ourselves exhilarated. It's thrilling to be so out
of scale with the massive shapes and high velocities of these frontier environments; to feel free of the city
yet reconnected to it in a way that is raw, visceral.
ENTERING EDGE TOWN The turbulent, wreckage-strewn perimeter of the city demarcates more than just its physical
edges. It represents a transition in the landscape's invisible characteristics: a change in its air chemistry,
its temperature, and the density of its electromagnetic space of media channels and data networks. Approaching
London, a dormant car radio will crackle into life as the city's radio stations come withing range, the pop and
hiss of the patchy radio 'landscape' analagous to the fragmented texture of the landscape seen through the
windshield.
The sprawling borough of Edge Town follows the contours of this transitional belt. Although largely unpopulated, the zone is punctuated with clusters of customized structures and sensing machinery, sited to sample the tidal flows of their transitional environment. From pop-up data allotments to permanent homes with hybrid gardens, the electro-physical topography of the borough affords many possibilities for different kinds of experience and inhabitation.
The sprawling borough of Edge Town follows the contours of this transitional belt. Although largely unpopulated, the zone is punctuated with clusters of customized structures and sensing machinery, sited to sample the tidal flows of their transitional environment. From pop-up data allotments to permanent homes with hybrid gardens, the electro-physical topography of the borough affords many possibilities for different kinds of experience and inhabitation.
MOTORWAY LIVING A typical Edge Town house is a long cellular structure of concrete, steel mesh and soundproofing
materials. The orientation of the house, perpendicular to the road, and the various configuration of its
shielding materials ensure that each chamber promotes a different quality of interface between the internal
private "home space" of the house and its extreme environment. At one end, a bunker-like chamber is protected
from its harsh environment by thick concrete walls, soundproofing and air conditioning. At the other end of the
house, a steel mesh cage provides an exposed "air garden" above the busy carriageway. Although this space,
totally exposed to weather and noise and exhaust fumes, is no domestic retreat, it is perfect for watching the
streaming lights of cars at night, or perhaps the burning wreckage of a crash at dusk. Sandwiched between these
contrasting spaces are two partially enclosed chambers, yard-like spaces which have noise shielding in their
walls but are open to the sky. These spaces provide quieter, wind-shielded vantage points with good views
– up, of the sky and cloud and airplane vapor trails; and down, through the mesh flooring, of the
embankment and the blurred sweep of traffic.
A closer inspection of the roadside environment where the asphalt surface gives out and the embankment begins reveals a wild and fascinating landscape, full of the detritus of city commuters and rich in animal and plant life, thriving in the nitrogenous air. These are stormy, secret gardens, constantly bombarded by material from the roadway, and offer a wide variety of textures for those willing to look; patterns of dust and dirt, geometric fragments of glass and plastic, the exotic shapes of burnt-out tires, intertwining vortices of litter and dead plant matter.
Just as householders tend their gardens to improve the outlook, residents of Edge Town adjust the position of custom "noise farming" machinery to sense, transform, transmit and display the patterns and flows of these roadside ecosystems. The clustering of noise farming machines creates an electronic ecosystem of interactive objects. Chain reactions of activity occur as one device activates and triggers the next, and so on. Complex patterns are formed from the rhythms and bursts of sound, movement, heat and light. Within each garden, typically some devices are fixed in one place to sample a particular data flow – the frequency of passing cars, for example. Other devices are regularly moved around so as to isolate, translate or amplify a less consistent character of the of the roadside environment.
Typically, the plants on the embankment grow up through the floor of the house's yard space, interacting with the sensors and electromechanical displays of the noise machines – the organic influencing the synthetic and vise versa. Tuned and tended, each ecosystem has a unique behavior which reflects its gardener. The different sheltering qualities of each of the houses' chambers, combined with the electronic 'garden' ecosystem of sensing and display objects, provide opportunities to creatively integrate, rather than isolate, the house with its dramatic roadside site. The air garden and the bunker core offer experiences at the extremes of exposure and isolation, but between them lies a nuanced domestic landscape where the house's occupier can enjoy selected transmuted aspects of the outside world.
A closer inspection of the roadside environment where the asphalt surface gives out and the embankment begins reveals a wild and fascinating landscape, full of the detritus of city commuters and rich in animal and plant life, thriving in the nitrogenous air. These are stormy, secret gardens, constantly bombarded by material from the roadway, and offer a wide variety of textures for those willing to look; patterns of dust and dirt, geometric fragments of glass and plastic, the exotic shapes of burnt-out tires, intertwining vortices of litter and dead plant matter.
Just as householders tend their gardens to improve the outlook, residents of Edge Town adjust the position of custom "noise farming" machinery to sense, transform, transmit and display the patterns and flows of these roadside ecosystems. The clustering of noise farming machines creates an electronic ecosystem of interactive objects. Chain reactions of activity occur as one device activates and triggers the next, and so on. Complex patterns are formed from the rhythms and bursts of sound, movement, heat and light. Within each garden, typically some devices are fixed in one place to sample a particular data flow – the frequency of passing cars, for example. Other devices are regularly moved around so as to isolate, translate or amplify a less consistent character of the of the roadside environment.
Typically, the plants on the embankment grow up through the floor of the house's yard space, interacting with the sensors and electromechanical displays of the noise machines – the organic influencing the synthetic and vise versa. Tuned and tended, each ecosystem has a unique behavior which reflects its gardener. The different sheltering qualities of each of the houses' chambers, combined with the electronic 'garden' ecosystem of sensing and display objects, provide opportunities to creatively integrate, rather than isolate, the house with its dramatic roadside site. The air garden and the bunker core offer experiences at the extremes of exposure and isolation, but between them lies a nuanced domestic landscape where the house's occupier can enjoy selected transmuted aspects of the outside world.
