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.
12 The Pilgrim Temple of Canonic desires
This pavilion is a pastiche, a melding, a sampling or reusing composed from misquotations and distortions of pieces of architecture. It is built on the remainder of the ‘Windowall’ section. A degree of architectural erudition is required to disentangle the conflations if your desired way of reading it is ‘spot the original’. An alterative mode of reading is to consider what is there, the parts, the whole, their relations, interest, or otherwise. Regardless of a viewer’s reading, in my making it was a compilation forged from architectural elements.
Most of the roof plan of La Chapelle-Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier (1950-1955) is used as a floor. Here, the plan is mildly warped and angled more than the sloped floor of the chapel. A level platform leading to it is sheltered by a roof derived from any of a number of houses by Frank Lloyd Wright. (Wright’s houses that utilise pretty much this roof form and pitch include the Ward Willits House (1901), the Frederick Robie House (1906), the Avery Coonley House (1907), Taliesin (1911), and the Harry Adams House (1913).) The initial plan of Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane (1638) chapel is let into the Ronchamp-based platform. Its sixteen pilasters rise from below. Here, they are transformed into columns made of clear Perspex reminiscent of the glass columns of the Paradiso Hall of Terragni’s Danteum project of three hundred years later. This was a translation of a translation as the Danteum is a rich re-working of the poetry of Dante into an architectural project. There are sixteen columns supporting the roof at Ronchamp although their expression is subtle. In the Paradiso room by Giuseppe Terragni, there are thirty-two – plus one in its entry. This is a satisfactory relationship. The hammered metal roof in this model parallels that of Ronchamp but some of the windows of the South wall of the chapel are let into it, and it is reversed relative to the plan. The rising Perspex columns intentionally fail by various amounts to touch the roof. Positioned where the towers at Ronchamp occur, there are two brass-framed towers, one of which is structurally irrational. The height of the larger one is appropriate for the size of the plan. As transformations of an original, they are tenuous, being frame rather than mass construction, and formally unrelated to the original’s white towers. The final major element is a re-working of the original scheme, not the simpler built version, of a folly at Osaka by Morphosis Architects. (All the schemes were published in Isozaki: Osaka Follies, 1991.) On the towers in the model and on extensions of the quoted folly, there are cranes – again made from hard drive components. The two roofs hang from the cranes.
The diverse elements in this model span centuries, styles, and schools of architecture; they are predominantly canonic and selected from my repertoire of known works based on their formal usefulness. I attempted to coax them into a model concerning the idea of canonic works as metaphoric temples, places of pilgrimage in both physical and intellectual landscapes. Here, I wanted to inflame the desires that architectural pilgrims harbour to visit such canonic temples.
The originals can more-or-less be recognised despite the distortions, mutations, and substitutions. My alterations partially parallel translations of texts between languages where there is an alteration of language and cultural context resulting in a new work, although typically regarded as the same work in another set of words.
Base: 251 mm x 131mm. Model: 274mm x 172mm. Height: 210mm.
Initiated: April 2005. Constructed: November 2006 – 26 July 2007.