The Vanity of a Breathing Bubble
Architectural Competition "Alternate Realities" - 2020 - Participation
For primitive beings, like humans, life seems to have one single purpose; gaining time. In a world, where every “No-way” turns to be our common past, adaptation seems to be the key for our safety and therefore our survival. Even in the most unfavorable habitat, what assures adaptation is well-being. Self-sufficiency and self-management are the main goals that humans try to fulfill during an outrage, and it is through this fulfillment that mortality tends to be relinquished.
The past 120 years’ infographics show that environmental mismanagement has led to emergencies and disasters, which tend to be the main causes for sickness and deaths. Being transferred in the Alternate Reality of 2070, the city is redesigned and becomes the world’s innovation laboratory, where numerous urban models coexist and everything is digitally interconnected.
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Every user (past citizen) is now connected in the global synchronized network through the application “Stay Hearlthy” (=Stay Healthy on Earth) to participate in real-time global monitoring.Once an incident occurs, the suitable nodes are activated, to trace the emergency. The application, informs the users about the next steps. But what if the urban environment becomes totally unfavorable for humans, dangerous and insufferable?
Breathing Bubble (BB) is the shelter, which corresponds to a specific ID user, is activated in red-alert emergencies, and it can be settled everywhere.
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Even in a corrupted, nonviable urban habitat, the users have ensured their survival. The human continues to breathe, to live inside a bubble. In a parallel scene, a child is blowing a soap-bubble and the “Man is but a bubble”. *
*Marcus Terentius Varro. “Quod, ut dictur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex” (=What if as said, man is but a bubble): This sentence is a metaphor to express that a person may look very solid and substantial, but our life is as fleeting as a bubble, insubstantial, and completely fragile. The frailty of life, the constant proximity of death and its inevitability are often illustrated symbolically with soap bubbles in Vanitas paintings.
