The authors understand the balance of man and nature not as a trend, but as a strategic outlook, based on the intrinsic processes of life, sustainable in their development. The cyclicity of all that happens, regardless of its temporal and spatial scale (let it be daily flow of time or an annual cycle of changing seasons), has its own stages of growth, establishment, realization and transition into a new entity.
All the living beings: a human, a leaf, or a tree, going through their life cycles, are explorers, experiencing and enriching life itself. Our thoughts, emotions, skills, physical features exist both inside and “beyond” us.
The language of such architecture, appealing to the very nature of the living, creates biomimetic aesthetics with the artistic potential of a creator, acting as a “bridge” used to comprehend and connect the natural and the artificial.
Experienced and developed knowledge of a tree leaf as a fundament for an architectural concept, is incarnated in a project of such practical structure as a pedestrian bridge. The bridge is considered by us an interactive art space that comes into contact with the visitor, not only as a link between communication paths but also as a figurative and semantic conceptual sign. To fill it with an art object meaning, the Gulliver metaphor was selected.
Our Leaf Bridge project is a hymn to the life of a tree leaf, focused on its final phase that generates a wide range of knowledge. Acting as a co-creator with this nature representative, we share our experience and all the best each of us my offer at the moment. The project is a research, where the natural and the artificial are integrated into one creative process.
The project authors set themselves a task to transform the final stage of a life cycle into an art of drama, laden with the beauty of awareness.
Absorbing the experience of the material world, the entire scope and intensity of emotions, knowledge contains a sequence of images. Studying this living, natural material, its structure and morphogenetic program, we personalized the interviewed tree leaf life cycle experience, relying upon the emotional experience of its essence. Initiating the memory of the leaf’s life events in our consciousness, we managed to access its image-knowledge: the plastique of a leaf curved to catch a life-giving dew drop and their fleeting contact, a quiet corporeality of a crawling snail, a sensation of an anxious, alarming presence of a bustling ant procession, a waff of a bird flying by and a dropped feather, waltzing down, reminding of the last autumn dance ritual.
This change of figurative shots, whether it was a stormy fantasy or a dream of reincarnation (because we envy the birds), I never found out, but the joy of dialogue, sliding a warm stream of happiness for that sincere, frank conversation, filled me. There was no word, but the meanings came from us, and in this ecstasy, the leaf even seemed a little chatty, expressing regular revelations about familiar butterflies and especially about one with delicate fluffiness and incredible coloring. At that moment, I thought about how, in this world of emotions and soul feelings, we can be similar to each other. It seemed to hear, smile, understanding me, and then laugh, causing a light breeze that filled the general mood of its brothers in the settlement.
Project year: 2019
Team:
OOO “ADM” (OOO “Architecture Design Modeling”)
Author, chief architect: Alexey Myakota
Co-author, architect: Lidiia Gribakina
