The 4th Epoch aims to highlight the significant climate threat facing the UK’s coastlines through a building proposal and gamified landscape adjacent to it, located at Hurst Castle. Isolated communities — previously brought together through military conflict — have survived, and thrived, in what might have been deemed an uninhabitable landscape. Now situated at the forefront of a climatic invasion, the proposal looks to reinvigorate the castle’s physical inhabitation by siting in it a research outpost and a public amenity. Further to this, digital inhabitation of the surrounding gamified landscape enables an immersive engagement with the vulnerable coastline for ‘virtual’ researchers from around the world. This benefits the castle’s future integrity. Utilising a defensive module system driven by local community desires, virtual interventions are realised within the landscape in due course through on-site fabrication.

The UK’s coastal management scheme has significant inadequacies. This can be seen at Hurst Castle, where insufficient protection has led to portions of the castle wall collapsing. Many other such ‘Device Forts’ sit within the Solent and are similarly vulnerable to climate change. Each site is treated as a relic; its architecture is preserved in time whilst the surrounding landscape fluctuates.