B. The prelude series pavilions
Again, Chopin’s piano pieces were precursors, specifically the 24 preludes from opus 28. The pieces are stand-alone works that do not precede a subsequent piece. Only four models comprise this series and in this case each model was made in response to a title selected from a list I devised to serve as goads or, at best, as architectural design briefs. I had no idea what any of the things titled were – I generated them as word play to offer me difficulty prior to, and during, designing/making.
8 Music Jetty
I have memories of lower decks of timber piers crouched above the water with the sea sometimes splashing through, secretive places with planks close above filtering the light, places to be unnoticed while others walked the proper pier above. This performance place offers polished timber jetties for nineteenth-century resonant music, but a hard, industrial floor hovers close above it for later works. Major music-performance places for such music often offer a backdrop of organ pipes. Jetties have fishing rods; music spaces have microphones on spidery sticks.
The upper floor plate is made from samples obtained in an early quest for mesh about the time of making the second pavilion (prior to the availability of the mesh subsequently used). The samples waited patiently for their moment in the light. The metal was now cut to conform to an initial card template, but a number of pieces had to be used, giving rise to jointing and fabrication puzzles. The plates were distressed through the application of a grinding wheel on a power tool. This structure is held on aluminium rods drilled into two supporting towers shaped from remnants of the benchtops used in previous bases. The rods echo architecture of Shin Takamatsu; the towers are basically boat hulls. Originally, I set out to make a version of long, framed fishing rods that I had seen in photographs. At one point these were mentally crossed with the gantries on the skyline of container ports. They became too big and complex, too likely to overwhelm the rest of the work, and too difficult to construct convincingly. Having flirted with such excesses I retreated to a minimal solution with the attraction of two potential readings.
As with the previous pavilion, on this and subsequent occasions I was relaxed about how much I designed by drawing and how much by making. There were no rules; I drew ‘naturally’, in the sense that I did not really reflect upon it but drew if and when it was the natural means for progressing my self-imposed task. Likewise, I produced mock-ups at the scale of the pavilion without being self-conscious about whether it was the right way to design in the circumstances. Given that I was keeping track of all my activities I was certainly not unaware of what I was doing, but I observed it rather than prescribed it. This pavilion started with the title followed by some exploratory sketches – attempts to inquire what a ‘music jetty’ might be while attending compulsory and unenlightening instruction on the teaching of ‘creativity’.
Base: 233mm x 212mm. 267mm x 262mm. Height: 175mm.
Initiated: February 2002. Constructed: December 2002 – 8 September 2003.