The island has long been the interface between the known and the unknown, the outpost on the edge of the frontier, the satellite stronghold that often operates just beyond the periphery of the rules and boundaries of the mainland. As such, the island becomes a staging ground for the visible and invisible machinations of empire. In this way, the island has often born witness to the evolution of Colossus. In particular, the Mediterranean Island, with its isolated interior but still intimate connection to trade routes and shorelines of the inland sea, presents a hybrid typology that inhabits both ends of the spectrum of connectivity.
The origin of Colossus is constantly shifting, a hybrid of atmospheric and euclidian constructs that enriches its spatial condition and embeds in its edge a power to momentarily reveal the invisible. The New Colossus recalibrates the metrics of that liminal space between land and sea, territory and wilderness, isolation and connectivity, interior and exterior. The hybrid origin of the New Colossus must be harnessed and exploited to further augment architecture’s ability to engage with these large scale, latent conditions.
The Strait of Sicily, the divider between the two basins of the Mediterranean Sea, between religions and cultures of the East and West, and between economic disparities of the North and South, becomes the test site for a series of speculations on the form and function of the New Colossus, manifested through the figure of the island in a vast and often scaleless seascape. The new island Colossus is a half land-form, half architectural hybrid that engages in a contemporary debate about the scale of frameworks and contexts through which architecture is designed and thought.
