niallmclaughlin.com

This project is for a flower farm on the site of an abandoned nuclear missile launch site. Previously, it had been used by the US airforce, as a base for clandestine missions into occupied Europe during WW2. B24 Carpetbagger bombers flew resistance agents out on night-time parachute drops. US aircraft landed on secret sites, behind enemy lines, to deliver munitions and to collect agents from the field. The airbase has been demolished, leaving a one-kilometre slice of concrete in the middle of big scale farming. A small stone monument marks the end of the runway and a dwindling band of veterans continues to visit.

Our client will produce cut flowers for the mass market using telephone ordering linked to highly automated forms of production under polythene tunnels. Propagation will be accelerated using artificial light blasts, automatic spraying and genetic manipulation. The land will become an array of poly structures, water containers and solar panels. The old runway is the armature for production. Computer directed seed banks move up and down on a solar-powered electric rail.

Phototropic is her laboratory and studio. It acts like a hangar for the precious seed banks. They slide back down inside the building. Solar panel screens recharge their batteries. The cabinets form a storage wall for the laboratory where highly valuable pollen is manipulated, species are developed and rare blooms photographed. The ceiling of the nave wraps around daylight to produce intense calm. The north wall is a screen of cast glass, arrayed with tiny projectors and chilling rods. Energy generated by the solar array on the south wall is playfully expended onto this screen. It mists up, freezes and displays a geometric matrix of video blooms filmed in the polytunnels and collated onto the screen. It is unpredictable like the weather. Its rhythms are generated from the automatic landscape beyond which in turn is linked to the telephone ordering system.

The building is constructed from in-situ cast concrete walls with folded roof forms in silver galvanised profiled steel. We want the exterior to have echoes of Nissan Huts and the smooth internal surfaces to act as registers of light from the landscape. The galvanised surfaces will pick up changing light and colour. The north window will be thick cast glass punctured by stainless steel cooling rods. The floors and benches will form a continuous surface of polished concrete. The solar array will act as a screen to the south light, forming strong geometric shadows in the interior when the cabinets are in use.

This project was prepared as part of an exhibition of British Architecture at the Sao Paolo Biennalle in 1997: 'New Works – Future Visions'. The brief was to project what architecture might be like in the next century. We imagined an English landscape in which technology was a low-level diffuse presence. The flowers are responding to the rhythm of nature and the rhythm of the market mediated by telecommunications. We relish the eerie artificial quality of this farmland. On Valentines Eve, or if a princess dies, the ‘phones will start ringing and the whole landscape will crackle into electronic life.