Anonymous Reality: Lucid Terrain
Yixia Xu
Parcels of post-industrial land have been abandoned because they are no longer considered useful to our economic needs. Real-estate has taken over these sites and transformed them into economically profitable property. However, their disregard for the terrain’s former use and gratuitous re-layering in an attempt to create a blank slate not only fragments local space but literally buries urban memory.
The ultimate goal of the project is to uncover a territorial narrative and disrupt the existing market logic. Disintegration of the property and engagement with the archaeological landscape will reveal the site’s former uses and its physical manipulations. Such disruptions would provide an opportunity for the terrain to discover a usability incompliant to the real-estate framework.
In order to achieve this, the project sells Marine Point Leisure — a luxury recreational extension designed to elevate the desirability of the existing residential complex. It utilises the embedded architecture to transport seawater to its pools and lake. However beneath the surface, the buried architecture is instrumentalised to disintegrate the new soil that the property sits on.
Marine Point Leisure essentially hacks into the real-estate system and becomes an act of resistance. To an audience that only listens to the music of economic profit, the project uses its enemy’s strength against itself. Using excavational mapping, the marketing strategy dissolves the property from within to expose a complex terrain undulating with appropriative layers and turning points.