Terrain Vague

Terrain : [tuh-reyn]

area of land of a specified nature

Vague : [veyg]

not clearly expressed, indistinct

From a call for papers I notices at the beginning of the summer and a essay response from Kazyz Varnelis about Robert Smithson's, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” I began to notice many connections between my thesis, Stormfront and the topic of Terrain Vague. Coined by Ignasi de Sola Morales Rubio in his paper “Terrain Vague” in Anywhere in 1995, the term has again been stimulated by the field of architecture. Why is it now that we are again interested, specifically myself in these middle places of gray scale between colorful borders? The proximity and witness to Detroit and it honesty of its own downsizing of the disproportional amount of vague terrains within the city exposes what is happening in varying amounts globally. With foreclosures and the recession the surplus of vague spaces will only exceed the tolerance and new opportunities must be found for these places. From the purely abandoned industrial Battleship Island to the adopted terrains unofficially claimed by homeless, the sites of intervention vary tremendously. It can be about creating a process of collecting the embodied energy of the site and utilizing its characteristics to transform it into a place of possibilities unable to be realized on the other side of the vague boundary.

I have collected pieces from writings that tackle, define and expose the potentials of Terrain Vague. They all carry through the defining features set out by Sola Morales “Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation”, but each one adds active definitions that contribute to a new process of envisioning the unrealized.

“Terrain Vague recalls the process of evolutionary biologist call expatiation in which a trait or capability, repeated within the context of successful growth and adaptation, becomes co opted for unforeseen uses”.

-Alan Berger Drosscape

“Terrain Vague is a different kind of surplus, a waste product, that in lying abandoned, performs no function except to contain sheer potential. 'Dormant' was a place in which something had happened, long ago... such sites contain trace heat of the past occupation”.

-Kazyz Varnelis The Potential of Passaic

“Indeterminate zones that punctuate the urban landscape and represent unacceptable socio-economic deterioration and abandonment... offering room for spontaneous creative appropriation and informal uses that would have otherwise had trouble finding a space for resistance to emerge and alternate ways of experiencing the city”.

-Luc Levesque The Terrain Vague as Material

Terrain- “A larger and perhaps less precisely defined areas of territory, connected with the physical idea of proportion of land in an expectant state, exploitable with definition”

Vague-”Seaswell, Vacuus, Vagus” Movement, oscillation, flux, vacuum, empty, unengaged, indeterminate, blur

-Sola Morales Terrain Vague

“Actually, the landscape was no landscape, but 'a particular kind of heliotypy' (Nabokov), a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur”.

-Robert Smithson A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey

“Marginal, semi-abandoned spaces in or along the edge of a city”

•site situation • forms of documentation • contextual definitions/theories • urban wilds • transgression and recreation • urban natural history • environmental justice • interventions

-Site Situation Call for Papers

The call for papers topics refresh my approach to the House as Thesis with these concepts in mind:

Who or what resides in the house?  • From what are they sheltered, and relative to what is inhabitation conditioned? • Inside/Outside :  How is the boundary defined and the threshold permeated? What kinds of veils condition the envelope or extents of the construct? • Site: at multiple scales, in geologic and climatic material considerations • Materials, Construction, and modes of Assembly • Time / Timeline / Seasons / Duration / Weathering

Within the first gambit, it seems that all these things can be tackled to understand and define a House as Thesis with recognizable similarities to Terrain Vague.