Dauphin Island, located off the coast of Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico, is known for experiencing perpetual and catastrophic hurricanes. When a storm hits the small island of around 1,200 people, it often washes away much of the coastline with it, leaving residents to rebuild their homes again and again following every big storm.
Artist Dionisio González became fascinated by this society's ability to endure creation and destruction in such rapid succession, willingly succumbing to the whims of nature's cycles time and time again. The artist, who has always held an interest in architecture, embarked on a mission to design surreal structures that would better suit the fraught island's populous, fusing fantasy with the inhabitants' inevitable reality.
For his series "Dauphin Island," González designed dreamlike, futuristic forts made from iron and concrete, fusing the role of artist with that of architect, engineer and urban planner. The peculiar edifices -- the hybrid of a beach house, a bunker and a space ship -- are as structurally whimsical as they are sustainably sound. With his hypothetical blueprints, González illustrates how the collision of chaos and beauty is a precious site for creativity.
In a second series, "Inter-Action," González crafted a fictional environment in which natural resources become physically indispensable to "manmade" buildings. Grafting his structures to their natural surroundings, González renders a fictional world in which natural and urban environments are not just in harmony, but are actually fused together. Purely through creating images, González offers up the potential of shifting the established order of things, thus opening up the future to the possibility of change.
Images are from González's "Architecture for Resistance," which showed at Yusto/Giner Gallery in Marbella, Spain.