Amid escalating environmental precarity, can architecture continue to uphold a fixed model of authorship, or should it yield to a more contingent, co-authored process – one shaped through ongoing dialogue between human and non-human agencies, between acts of construction and forces of erosion, between deliberate intent and emergent chance?
This thesis unfolds in two interrelated investigations that explore architecture as a medium of registration – one that draws from the latent ecologies of time, climate, and material degradation. Working sequentially across the scales of instrument and building, the project begins with an analog apparatus sited in Epping Forest, designed to register the ephemeral spatiality of a wind fetch through kinetic drawing and light inscription. From this poetic act of calibration, the research transitions into a building proposal that embraces decay as a generative process. Situated at the urban-rural threshold, the architecture is conceived as a participant in a wider ecological theatre – its form, skin, and assembly continuously shaped by weather, occupation, and the slow passage of time. Together, the two parts propose an alternative mode of architectural production, one that engages uncertainty as a condition for design and acknowledges architecture as both witness to, and agent within, an ecological continuum.