4. Elongated Maison Dom-Ino
In 1914, Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier proposed a diagram "Maison Dom-Ino". This project was an abstraction about the status of the architectural plan. More importantly, Maison Dom-Ino was a story about the early 20th Century relationship with the ground. In Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture, one can read within it the status of "ground" during a time of international economic and political revolutions.
The act of detaching oneself from the ground is a declaration of political dissociation: upon the same plane, two (or more) ideological models can co-exist, particularly when bracketed by a framework that is architecture. In particular, the piloti is a very important component of Le Corbusier's detachment from the ground. Unlike all of the European columns that came before the piloti (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, etc), the piloti is the first one lacking in both base and capital. It is a shaft-only column that rejects the notion of up (capital) or down (base). Consequently, the idea of the roof garden and the free plan are both acts of total detachment made possible by the rejection of orientation.
In our project, the Future Archaeologist, we want to continue this conversation in the 21st Century, nearly 100 years from Maison Dom-Ino. This time, we regard ground as layers of physical time, as well as layers of air as time we have yet to arrive.