BLADDERBLADDER
URBAN RECONCEPTUALIZATION PROJECT FOR ANCHORAGE, ALASKA


MARK ANDERSON, PETER ANDERSON, CAMERON SCHOEPP ANDERSON ANDERSON ARCHITECTURE / JET CONSTRUCTION


This is an urban design investigation and site specific installation project for the City of Anchorage, Alaska.  Commissioned by the Alaska Design Forum with funding from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, this project’s goal is to rethink the conceptual framework of the urban design process and to conceive a new ordering principle to guide the future construction of Anchorage based on the unique conditions of human sensory experience on this site.  The project operates at multiple scales, imagining specific large-scale interventions within the city as well as building an experimental apparatus to produce a human experience of urban space without the intervening abstractions of analogous language, maps or diagrams.  This apparatus,HotPlateColdPlateMudMapSnowBlindBladderBladder, distills important aspects of human experience in Anchorage down to fundamental local issues of space, light, heat, cold, mud, time, flow, and body knowledge. The visceral experience of the urban body suggests a concept of architectural space described in this project as Liquid Space.  As architectural space, Liquid Space is all fullness and no emptiness, placing action and experience within the fullness of continuous material:  infinite and inevitable rippling consequence surrounding the body throughout the fullness of space.  As applied to the development of new urban structures this concept creates a process of urban design projected from the interactive sensory experience of the knowing body rather than from the abstract constructions of the disembodied mind.