Listening Tree
Spaesamento in San Pedro Hills
Sierra de Guadarrama, Madrid
In 1992, David Nash allowed wood's nature to finish his sculptures. Cracking Box, a perfectly square cube of wood, was left to its formal evolution every time the wood reacted to a humid environment. A few later, the box expressed the formal discord of the permanent cube by expressing fissures, ripples, and cracks that made the box a double geometric shape: the original perfect Platonic one and the cracked and performative one. In Listening Tree, this idea translated to banalizing the Le Ricolais' tower made out of tensile concepts, eventually leading us to complete the concepts, forms, and principles for the tensegrity structure that we announced naming the proposed structure: a structure that listens to the environmental changing conditions. A Structure we call "Listening Tree."
Listening Tree is a tensegrity structure that is built with wood and steel. The wooden rods are cut against the grain, becoming finer at the extremes and thicker at the center, and with a curved section lengthwise that responds better to compression stress. Once the structural system is assembled, it is abandoned in the out space to its evolution, acknowledging that wood has internal potential energy and an active capacity for transformation in relation to states of relative humidity. The rods are coordinated with the whole functioning of the structural equilibrium through the collective stress that facilitates the tensile forces. Internal stress, load, and tension keep the system's equilibrium. It is in Latourian's Actor-Network Theory, a network in which every element keeps both its own and collective stability. When Listening Tree is introduced in the Sierra de Guadarrama's environment, at the feet of the Cerro de San Pedro in Madrid –outside the workshop where it has been constructed in constant environmental parameters–a process of internal deformation emerges seeking adaptation between the wood and the environment. Very slowly, Listening Tree creates a series of different forms driven by each rod. As it reaches new states of equilibrium, Listening Tree will continue to warp in new and diverse ways until reaching the limit of equilibrium, in other words, its own mode of technical existence. That ultimate form passes over the threshold of its last possible equilibrium. At that moment, the structure bubbles up and vanishes into the air.