Rock Skin: A City-Building Process Towards Ecological Empathy

Rock Skin is an alternative approach towards the building of our living spaces in response to the long-standing detachment between building and sourcing. By introducing a new agent—the rock-skin that mediates between ‘a fragment of the mountain’ and ‘a building block’—we seek to forge a new relationship between the city (material consumption) and the mountain (natural resources). Like taking a photograph, we capture mountain surfaces “in-time” with thin layers of natural latex. Peeling off the latex skin, we leave the mountains “untouched”—an act of resistance against depletion. A cast of bioplastic solidifies against the Rock Skin mold and renders visible traces of the disappearing geological formation. As we encounter the cast, we can still experience the reality of the mountain through its texture and form, even though the mountain isn’t physically present.