Drawing the coastline that no longer exists

The 2018 survey line at Orkney is already a fiction. We keep it on the sheet, in a pale ink, as a ghost. The new line is measured every March and drawn in a heavier hand.

This is not melancholy. It is a working method. If the architecture cannot be understood against a moving baseline, it is the wrong architecture for that shore.

Students who visit the Salt Line Observatory are asked to mark the day salt bloom on the stone base. In ten years those marks will be more useful than our original sections.

I am less interested in resilience as a brand and more interested in buildings that can be honest about their own expiry.