Artificial Mountain

This project proposed a radical proposition: the construction of a new city at the centre of Fukuoka, Japan, in the form of an enormous artificial mountain. The mountain and the city share a common typological condition. For the geologist James Hutton, the mountain was not a fixed or isolated object, but the result of continuous geological processes, constantly formed and eroded through cycles of renewal that revealed “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”.¹ Aldo Rossi understood the city in a similar way, as an ongoing field of individual forms continually shaped through processes of construction and reification, without a clear beginning or end.

These ontological positions provided the starting point for the project. Rather than simply proposing a new building or precinct, the project questioned whether an alternative to the city is possible at all. If there is no pre-urban condition to which we can return, then any attempt to move beyond the city must instead construct an alternative from within it. The project therefore proposed an object so physically and conceptually immovable that the city would have to reorganise itself in relation to it.

1. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1788).