C. The bridging series pavilions
This pair were simply a continuation of prior making in my understanding at the time. In retrospect they can be seen to be moving toward the ‘Machines for Making’ which followed. Hence, I have categorised them as bridging pavilions.
11 Music Bridge: a chamber of iterative interpretations
There are, of course, several senses of the term ‘bridge’ in music and the viewer may decide the extent to which each or any of them are apposite as my account unfolds. A length of cedar Stegbar ‘Windowall’ (originally designed by Australia architect Robin Boyd) is the site for this model. It may voyage in search of the new given that one end is partially hull shaped; its journey will be musical. A painted papier-mâché shell formed over modelling clay in the shape of half the rear of a stringed instrument – a cello or violin perhaps – is supported on a metal frame. Sheltered below are three bridges each with a collection of controlling arms echoing bridges in the Netherlands; maybe they allude to castle drawbridges, but I know their more sinuous forms were influenced by dECOi Architects bronze hearth in the Haddad apartment refurbishment, Paris, 2001 (seen in a lecture by Mark Goulthorpe). Regardless, music making pervades the whole as so many components are drawn from within hard disks or are plugs or other internal computer parts currently involved in the production or the making of music. Likewise, there are elements of bridges, ramps, and possible piers; no single fascination predominates.
Ideas about music and modelling shaped one another. Yet, the whole does not seem to evoke music in a viewer and connect these to the forms of the model without provocation. Although music became the principle informative concept, this evolved slowly and increasingly ordered and informed an array of poorly focused ideas. There are a number of fairly direct translations from music to architecture – even when the music form is used in unusual ways or compounded by cross-pollinations as in the grand piano form. Where can such analogues be sought? What are the grounds for arguing that a physical form in some way equates with a musical form? It is hard to know what criteria can be used to assess the success of such mappings. Further, why might this piano-shaped hull be filled with gravel – perhaps in the form of a garden – and how have sound waves propagated within it? Does it enhance a viewer’s appreciation to learn that the timber for the piano was rescued from a construction site waste skip?
A further conflating of ideas is to be found in the less-musical industrial hopper form. This emerged from two sources: an enduring interest in the work of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher (also evident in other models), and from the Basel signal boxes by architects Herzog and de Meuron visited two years prior to constructing this.
Base: 259mm x 131mm. Model: 259mm x 205mm. Height: 181mm.
Initiated: April 2005. Constructed: April 2005 – 25 October 2006.