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 peculiar typological commonality. For the geologist James Hutton, the mountain was not a fixed and isolated object but a transient manifestation of continuous geological processes, perpetually formed and eroded within a cycle of geomorphic renewal that evinced “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”.¹ For Aldo Rossi, the city was configured in an identical way, as an endless field of individuated forms perpetually engaged in processes of construction and reification, without any discernible origin or conclusion. Yet these ontological affinities were only a point of departure. This project proceeded by questioning the very possibility of an alternative to the city, asking how critique might be constituted when no pre-urban condition remains available as a site of return, any such gesture becomes little more than an attempt to move a mountain.

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