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.
3 An Architect’s Dreamed Shelter
An architect’s dream: Carlo Scarpa and Frank Gehry work together making a shelter at the seaside. Being a dream, we need not inquire as to why, or alternatively we devote a great deal of post-Freudian or other interpretive effort to conjuring meanings.
Etymologically a pavilion is a tent. How tent-like can something made of metal be? Many pavilions, particularly in England, lay on, or terminate, axes. To what extent can axes be denied and still be axis-like? Various nautical allusions permeate the pavilion: there is a hull, a gangplank, hull ribs, and sails. Each is a misquotation of a form or is an independent construction informed by a nautical antecedent. This is a study in marginal undertakings, an investigation of the boundaries of several concepts: the nature of the tent, the readability of an axis, and the limiting conditions of formal borrowings from both architectural and non-architectural sources. The architects sourced are not formally quoted, but influential. I display at least some of my knowledge of them; the viewer brings greater or lesser knowledge and, in their viewing, reads the work accordingly.
Imperfection: the field of lightning conductors, or perhaps it is a peristyle hall, denies the regularities of its antecedents yet still alludes to them – the heights and angles of the rods vary, there is even a ‘growing’ one at an angle to make sure the viewer notices the irregularities (but in honesty this is opportunistic as the hole existed in the piece of wood). Despite a deal of model-making effort there is no possibility of ‘perfection’ in one of these models given the methods by which they are made.
I have unidentifiable mental images of brass and copper side by side in some sort of dusty museum artefact. This linked with old images of military tents with alternating fabric colours and perhaps stripes on a Victorian veranda cowl. A sketch showed signs of Scarpa and this was further explored. Some interest in Frank Gehry’s work had been more clearly focused by seeing a model of proposals for Bilbao at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. These influences coalesced along with axial plans from any period. My specific fascination was with some of the axial games played by Lutyens in his houses at the end of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century. Somehow boat forms, hull shapes, submarine sails, ribs, sails, and Walter De Maria’s ‘Lightning Field’ in New Mexico all crept in.
By this third pavilion I thought I should somehow break with the tyranny of the base – the extent to which the horizontal plane was determining the design of each pavilion. I considered raising the pavilion above the base plane or putting the base on a slope. The final decision was to explore the ambiguity of the base by cutting out a section and extending the model below the dominant horizontal plane. This followed from gouging into the base of the previous pavilion.
Base: 226mm x 159mm. Model: 266mm L. Height: 149mm.
Initiated: 1 November 1996. Constructed: December 1996 – 17 February 1998.