Student Work
Title
Black Boxes
Project Description
The vernacular is strangely timeless. What happens behind closed doors in the home remains out of public domain. Hidden within the domestic landscape is a public interface. These mystery black boxes of Iceland’s landscape speak to a larger global infrastructure.
What appear to be prosaic and banal structures in the modern Icelandic landscape are actually a part of a global infrastructure, standing as isolated towns. Off the grid from larger support systems working in an extreme localized system–hyper insulated, exhausted, heated, and cooled.
In the late 2030s, the shed company, Hexal, began distributing prefabricated systems. There is an interconnected network that we only see at the nodes of consumption. The entire global infrastructure is kind of hidden: mines, power generators, processing plants, coders, hackers, satellites, undersea cables, transmission towers, etc. What lies beyond the walls of these conglomerated houses is changing the landscape of Iceland.