Architect Anna Ulak, inspired by the popular James Bond films, shared with us her ‘Storming Medusa’ proposal, the new villain’s lair in our ecologically and politically precarious present. Ulak notes how James Bond movies can be considered phantasmagorias which have allowed audiences to imagine the future of architecture. But now that the Cold war is over, how can the James Bond genre be utilized again to imagine a new kind of architecture? Anchored off the coast of Cape Farewell in Greenland, the project draws on the physiological characteristics of jellyfish in order to suggest a new relationship between the built and natural environment. More images and architects’ description after the break.
James Bond movies have been a veritable catalogue of Cold war modernism. Each movie has a villain whose lair frequently uses the language of modern architecture. The project posits formlessness over form, field conditions instead of clear spatial boundaries, and the opportunity for movement rather than stasis. This architecture occurs at the moment of contact between water and epidermis. The ingenuity of the Medusa, according to its designers, is that it does not have a determined form but rather actively constructs its own environment by staging weather events and harvesting the energy needed for its own survival.
