A. Epistemological Pavilions – Etude Series
Etudes, at least for composers, are studies or exercises intended to provide a pupil with a range of possibilities for practice while being, at the same time, a worthwhile composition. Many composers have produced etudes where they have probably concentrated on the second purpose. Chopin’s etudes where the inspirastion for this series. Each model was commenced prior to me having any clarity about what I was making, and with only a limited idea about how I would make it; I engaged in making and through this generated ideas to direct further making. Titles came during this process as I began to gain confidence about a work. Some models had their titles refined near or at the end of making. Titles were intended to be evocatively descriptive.
2 The Palimpsest Tower
As is often the case with old buildings, initially determining past use of various elements, reasoning out the relationships at different times, and establishing the order of changes in use and occupation is difficult in this case. The cues perhaps contradict, or at least require an effort of accommodation. What do we assume and what do we know? It has been an occupied site for a lengthy period. There are ancient steps down to buried knowledge kept contained by a ventilated trapdoor. An aged and wind-swept tree demarks the entry; perhaps it is a, or even the, tree of knowledge. Old paving stones are set into long-firmed ground.
The current pavilion sits above this in an unhappily asymmetric way; it has used the grounding offered but has been positioned with little regard for what went before. The interior of the pavilion is not as old as the basic ideas upon which it stands. Over more than a century, it has been a bit battered, but the front has had a quick coat of green paint. It has been surrounded, colonised, re-wrapped and enfolded by a bright and shiny copper construction, supported by a skeletal steel frame that affords, from its balcony, a fresh view over the valley of ideas. From this vantage, there is a choice of frames through which one can survey the buzzing ideas beyond.
Large pipes connect to the ground from the pavilion. These pipes pose more than they answer – surely, there is inadequate space within to accommodate any equipment large enough to warrant such pipes. The silver pipe cuts the copper skin implausibly close to the front. Is it no more than technological image forging? There are signs of additions that are more recent, colonisations, softenings and domestication. A strong and simple table below an awning suggests that food and wine might be brought from within, and it is even possible to imagine some distant Tuscan hillsides, a haze of golden light in a late afternoon – particularly in these photographs.
Duration of physical occupation of this site parallels the continuing allegiance to an intellectual node in an otherwise less-differentiated realm of concepts and concerns. In the past (perhaps more than the present) physical occupation embodied knowing; myths, religions and temples all attest to this. The specific themes in this pavilion were inhabitation and its duration, palimpsests, wrapping, and layering and the way these are evident in the physical environment and thus enable learning from it.
Small scale industrial buildings, such as one seen and photographed South of Florence where Marion Pitt and I stayed 1985, are antecedents for this. The curved roof probably came from a lifetime repository of these mental images. Conversations on walks with Kevin Lynch in Paris (in 1973) about the ‘time of places’, the physical witness, the traces and the layerings of time informed the temporal theme. (The walks took place while working on a project published as ‘Growing Up in Cities: Studies in the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Toluca, and Warszawa’.) The timber models of Renaissance architecture underpinned the idea of letting timber pavers into the base. The ancient tree is of course from northern European myths – specifically coming to me from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Japanese Torii gateways informed one elevation. This is more evident in a faded pencil drawing of the frame, the copper skin and the roof, than it is in the model. This is all representation with varying degrees of veracity and reasonableness. Does this extend to the polished timber masquerading as ancient soil? Is it a child of the Anthropocene where there is no distinction between nature and artifice?
Base: 212mm x 159mm. Height: 164mm.
Initiated: 21 May 1996. Construction: June – November 1996