Genesis Project Part 1 Project 2012 Peter James Edwards Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool | UK There are currently 3.5 million oil installations around the world, 8,000 of these are offshore installations. These marks on our landscape are as a direct result of the industrious expansion that has catapulted our civilizations forward since the advent of the machine. The Genesis Project questions the future role of mechanised production in society (as our civilizations continue to expand), by extrapolating its development into an autonomous production system of cities, anchored around offshore installations located 4 miles off California’s coast, in Santa Barbara Bay.In doing this, Genesis seeks to question, the role and influence machines have had on our cultures and how this has altered the way we perceive our place in the world and in the environments we directly inhabit. The aim therefore, was to produce a piece of work that examines how this relationship may develop and unfold in the future by taking on the idea that our civilizations will eventually expand into the sea, as we develop past the capacity of land.This idea moves into a concept where our natural and man-made landscapes eventually fuse into a symbiotic form. Where our development actually bolsters the capacity of natural ecosystems rather than decimating them. However, what is also explored, is the human environments this may create and how this may affect the future evolution of our relationship to both built and natural landscapes.This project explores the Genesis of this future experiment, focusing on Platform Henry, which acts as one of the community and energy hubs that feed the growth of the community, well after the oil at these sites have run dry.The project asks questions about the problems we face with our continued growth as a global civilization, while interrogating the role architecture will take in this future, when both scales and systems of production supersede traditional concerns with such an experiment. What evolves through this is a community and installation constantly in flux, as the seemingly dystopic, industrial, mechanised landscape interweaves itself with the utopic landscape of nature, challenging and hopefully informing our perception of these before seemingly, antagonistic entities. Tutor(s)Ms Gladys Masey-Martinez