Final Critique

house moments

church moments

Caxton design

Sadly I have dropped the Caxton site from continued design development. It did not add significantly to my architectural investigation, and is too much to design three buildings to the level of detail required. It will remain as a suggestion and be somehow presented in my crit (though I have not figured out how).

Developing church design

evolutionofthecriticalquestion

An Architectural Response to the Ruins of Christchurch 
How does one architecturally respond to the ruins of Christchurch? (In reference to memory, history and heritage)
An Architectural Response to the Lost Buildings of Christchurch 
How does one architecturally respond to the lost buildings of Christchurch? (In reference to memory, history and heritage)

Architecture as Mnemonic Device: Reconnection to (lost) Site in Christchurch

Can architecture re-orientate (through mnemonic devices) the citizens of Christchurch to their city?

Can architecture re-orientate (through mnemonic devices) people to Christchurch?

Can architecture re-orientate people (through mnemonic devices) people to site in Christchurch? (since the destruction of the 2010/2011 earthquakes)

Can architecture re-orientate (through mnemonic devices) the people of Christchurch to their city?

(Re)Orientation to Erased Site: An Architecture for the rememberer(s) in Christchurch

Can architecture support (re)orientation to erased site in Christchurch?

(Re)Connection to Cleared Site: Architecture for the rememberer(s) in Christchurch

How can architecture (re)connect rememberer(s) to cleared sites in Christchurch?

sections

site drawings

Relating my 'parti' to different scales...

Quotes

Architecture enables us to perceive and understand the dialectics
of permanence and change, to settle ourselves in the world, and
to place ourselves in the continuum of culture and time.


Juhani Pallasmaa
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 2005: 71





The contrast between particular and universal, between individual
and collective, emerges from the city and from its construction, its
architecture.


Aldo Rossi
The Architecture of the City





It is an inescapable fact about human existence that we are made
of our memories: we are what we remember ourselves to be.


Edward S. Casey
Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2000: 290





What does ‘dwelling’ mean? It identifies all our architectural knowledge and historical experience...‘Dwelling’ in the existential sense, is the purpose of architecture. Man dwells when he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an environment, or in short, when he experiences the environment as meaningful.


(Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 1977)

“Places are a fusion of human and 

natural order and are the significant centres of our immediate 

experiences of the world. They are defined less by unique

locations, landscape, and communities than by the focusing

of experiences and intentions onto particular settings…they

are important sources of individual and communal identity,

and are often profound centres of human existence to which

people have deep emotional and psychological ties” (1976: 41).

Unconsciously or subconsciously we associate place with our

experiences of security and comfort. ‘Home,’ for example, is

physically and metaphorically our root of safety and security, a

point of care and concern, and the point from which we orient

ourselves to the outside world.

Edward Relph

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its
people, and like memory, it is associated with objects and places.
The city is the locus of the collective memory. This relationship
between locus and citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant
image, both architecture and of landscape, and as certain
artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge,

Aldo Rossi
The Architecture of the City, 1966:130


...the city is the collective expression of architecture and it carries in the weaving and
unraveling of its fabric the memory traces of earlier architectural forms, city plans,
and public monuments...its physical structure constantly evolves, being deformed or
forgotten, adapted to other purposes or eradicated by different needs. The demands
and pressures of social reality constantly affect the material order of the city, yet
it remains the theater of our memory. Its collective forms and private realms tell
us of the changes that are taking place; they remind us as well of the traditions
that set this city apart from others. It is in these physical artifacts and traces that
our city memories lie buried, for the past is carried forward to the present through
these sites. Addressed to the eye of vision and to the soul of memory, a city’s streets,
monuments, and architectural forms often contain grand discourses on history.


Christine M. Boyer
The City of Collective Memory, 1996: 30




We need a simplified physical environment from which we can reach out and understand the
world. Our individual and collective experience of time is an essential consideration of architecture, and one of our basic human needs. We as people cannot comprehend time as a
physical manifestation, “…we can only grasp time through its actualizations; the traces, places and events of temporal occurrence” (Pallasmaa, unpublished).


A trace is an outline, a proposal. That is taken up in an art of making or inhabiting that has no obligation to its past other than preservation of a tension between its forms and those projected out of the present.

David Leatherbarrow
Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture, 2004: 13\



The great majority [of a city’s inhabitants] may well be more sensitive to a certain street being torn up, or a certain building or home being razed, than to the gravest national, political, or religious events. That is why great upheavals may severely shake society without altering the appearance of the city. Their effects are blunted as they filter down to those people who are closer to the stones than to men – the shoemaker in his shop; the artisan at his bench; the merchant in his store; the people in the market; the walker strolling about the streets, idling at the wharf, or visiting the garden terraces; the children playing on the corner; the old man enjoying the sunny wall or sitting on a stone bench; the beggar squatting by a city landmark.

Maurice Halbwachs, “Space and the Collective Memory” (1939)



Collage and assemblage: media that enable an archaeological density and a non-linear narrative through the juxtaposition of fragmented images deriving from irreconcilable origins. Collage invigorates the experience of tactility and time.

Juhani Pallasmaa
“Melancholy and Time,” 1995: 325



It is not the obvious spatial relationship, but the use of a volume well articulated
by its involucre, extending or enclosing, to complement the cavity of its interior.
A portion of expanding space, but stayed by a shell that confines it: it may be a
part that breaks through to the front, or is contained by an interior. Space yielded
up by a void, but also space appropriated from a solid: a game of opposites,
transposing the meanings of spatial categories that are deliberately complex in
their roles, yet straightforward in formal definition. On the plane, this reads
as balancing of parts, play of chiaroscuro, modulation of rhythms, relating of
multiple symmetries and concealed alignments. Nothing here is casual. Every
factor has a purpose and represents a new departure.


Carlo Scarpa, as quoted from Architecture in Details



There is a tacit wisdom of architecture accumulated in history and tradition. But in today’s panicked rush for the new, we rarely stop to listen to that wisdom. Architecture needs slowness to re-connect itself with this source of silent knowledge. Architecture requires slowness in order to develop a cumulative tradition again, to accumulate a sense of continuity, and to become re-rooted in culture.

Juhani Pallasmaa
“Melancholy and Time”1995: 319



By architecture I mean not only the visible image of the city and the sum of its different architectures, but architecture as construction, the construction of the city over time.

Aldo Rossi
The Architecture of the City, 1966: 21

Rethinking the interviews

Rethinking the interviews I conducted in Christchurch with those who own the sites I am designing on. In particular, I am trying to work out how they fit into my thesis thought and structure. 


1 The City
The City as Containing Memory                                                                                              
(Theories of Kevin Lynch, Umberto Eco, Iain Borden)
Historic Cities
(walls in the medieval city, ground in the city)
Christchurch as Site
(the city’s history, the critical event(s))

2 Memorial Culture and Language
Memorial Culture
(Introduction)
Memorial Culture in New Zealand
House:
I might build something on it, but it wont be a replica. I could build something that was reasonably similar but I just don’t think it will work in modern materials, it just wont be the same as it was. 

But you just can’t have that back, so it becomes difficult then as to what you then do with the site. Its an unusual site, and it was fine when the house was on it, but as soon as the house comes off its like ‘oh what do you do with this?’

the council said ‘look, to stop you from building this (a replica of the old building) we will negotiate with you on something that breaks the rules, but not quite as badly. I’ve still got another four years on this (resource consent approval) so you never know, it might get built.

Caxton Press:

Very sad. It was very symmetrical. So what Peter Beaven was going to do… it was going to be steel I-beams, painted black. We will do something similar, but it will be on the whole site. With that sort of look.

When they put the red sticker on my door my eyes got a bit red. It was a moment where it said ‘gone’ you know. That was after September. Yeah, I had a bit of a weepy moment. Because I knew that was it. But it gives us an opportunity to build something new on it. Which wont be a glass box, we wont be putting a glass box here.

Memorial Language
(discussion and analysis of precedents)

3 Experience and Memory
Theory of the Haptic in Architecture
(Theories of Pallasmaa, Leatherbarrow, Phenomenology, Semiotics)
Archetypes as Memory Device
(Aldo Rossi)
House:
When the building was original you came in the porch and then the stairs went up here. So that was the original front door, where it still was. So I would have changed it back around.

You could see because it was brick, and downstairs it was just plastered over. So you could see in the plaster where the steps had gone.

There was a massive fireplace. It had never been taken out, just filled in. So it went all the way up. It was huge. It had been taken out upstairs in one part, but not downstairs.

I’ve still got all the interior doors, I’m going to put them into my house one day. They were really heavy, really great doors… beautiful doors. So I decided I wanted to keep them.

Caxton Press:

Yeah, we always had it like that. With the front windows to the street view of course. And there were a lot of big windows in the reception as well, straight out onto the street. It was more like a shop front as you walked into reception.

Specific memories though… I do remember we used to have a staircase that was like a ships stairwell. You know in a ship? That steep. That used to be, until we built this building here… it used to go up here (draws)… there was a stairwell up into here. So this stairwell, literally, was like a ships staircase. It was that steep. The reception and accounts ladies were fearful of that staircase. Because it was really was steep. In the end, Bruce and I were like a couple of navy guys up and down the stairs. We could zoom up and down so quick. But for anybody who wasn’t used to it, they were precarious stairs. It was quite surprising how steep they were. But they disappeared when we built this place. 

But it was recessed, the door was. What I really liked about some of the windows was that some of the glass was original. It wasn’t perfect, the glass. Nowadays you see through a window and everything’s fantastic, you just see through it. But this glass wasn’t perfect. You’d look through it and it’d shimmer almost. Its hard to describe. It had a bit of a wave-iness to it. So you’d look through it and there’d be a change of angle. I used to really like that, those old windows. Because they just weren’t perfect. 

something I’ll always remember. Those windows. The glass would’ve been 100 years old. Every time, it was just so nice to see something like that. The glass I think actually was clearer if you got a spot. It seemed clearer than today’s glass in some parts. I don’t know why, but it was like there was more light coming through it. It was just these areas that had imperfections in it.

Church:

Did they save the stained glass windows?

A: Yeah they did, they got them out after the September quake, before the February one

Immediately as you walked through the door, it was a big heavy door, wooden, black. It is somewhere actually…

A: Oh ok, I was going to ask you if there’s anything you’ve saved. So the door you saved?

P: Yes the door is somewhere. Yes so this nice, heavy door. Brass handle and everything. And you’d immediately be spotted by whoever was sitting at the desk. 

A: Did you save any other parts of the building?

B: Just the door. It was wood paneled. Oh and we have a bit of Matai timber from the window sill out the back, my wife’s going to make a coffee table out of it. And about three bricks, and some wallpaper. 

The Framed View

House:
From the front you could see the hills. The back window also had quite a good view over things. You could sit in that window and look out, and that was nice.

Caxton Press:
Oh, these windows were great. You could see down onto the traffic. The whole frontage was good. It was always a working office downstairs. It was people on display almost. In the morning, in equinox it would get very hot in there so we had to have a verandah. 
(Writing of Lyndon Donlyn, paintings of Franco Magnani)


4 Collective Memory
Theory of Collective Memory
(Maurice Halbwachs, Piere Nora, and Peter Carrier)
(Case studies, Dresden, Munich)
Surface and Mass 
(Rachel Whiteread, Aldo Rossi)
Collective Ground
(In Christchurch, the scuptures of Alice Aycock)

Caxton Press:

Yeah. But it was sort of part of who we are. It was synonymous with the Caxton Press. People knew us because of that building... But you’d be able to say to people you worked at the Caxton Press, and they’d go ‘oh yeah, the old building on Victoria St’. You kinda miss that. We will be moving, and it’s a shame that wherever we move or whatever we get we’re not going to get that reputation of having a nice old building fronting us.

What happened was Dennis Glover went to war, he was in the navy. And Leo Benson kept the business going, because he was an objector. And then some of his arty left-wing ACDC friends kept it all going. And then in the 1940s a guy called Charles Brash, who was a wealthy man form Dunedin, started to fund Land Falls (a magazine they used to publish) and about that time, in the late 40’s, early 50’s, Glover went on one of his binges, didn’t pay the wages for two or three weeks… total disaster. So Dennie Donavor came down. He was one of the shareholders and lived in Havelock North. He came down and booted Glover out. A lot of acrimony. So Dennie Donavor stayed on as co-director with Leo Benson right until 1978. They both retired, and sold the company to the Bascand family, myself and my family…. It didn’t include the building though at that stage. That was owned by a family trust. And in the early 1980s we bought the building. Which was basically just the historical building, and a little lean-to. 

A: So the building was tied up with your identity

B: Oh yeah, a lot

B: Oh yes. Well there was an archeologist present at the time of demolition. We had a look at anything interesting… we didn’t find a hidden bottle or anything. There was a tin, a cigarette tin. It’ll be around somewhere. It wasn’t significant though, but it that way.

A: I guess it shows the history of the place, though

B: Yeah. Well we found a hidden window too, up there in the corner. I knew it was there. The building was just bricks and mortar, no steel involved… it just fell to pieces.

A: You said the foundations were only a brick down?

B: About two bricks down, yeah

Church:

I knew Paul Dunlop too, who was killed in there. He was a lovely man, an organist. He was going to go in on the Wednesday, but he decided to take an extra day off and go in there earlier… and… no structural integrity. That’s the problem. That’s the problem with all the buildings really.

5 Individual Memory
Theory of Individual Memory 
(Gaston Barchelard, Proustian theory and Frances Yates)

House:
The only thing with that was most of the sun was upstairs, so it was quite dark downstairs. The other thing was this little extension bit out the back. What we used to do from the kitchen was… there was a door here and we used to go out onto the roof. That would have been good to change it to some kind of outside deck because it got a tremendous amount of sun. It was really good there. I used to go out there and smoke cigarettes and stuff… because there was a bit of a parapet there, the top of the wall that you could sit on… just chuck your butts over to the neighbour on the other side. 

Some people owned it for about 20 years. They just used it when they were in town, so they hadn’t really taken much care of it. So it also hadn’t been used that much. There were about 20 cats in the back yard when I got it. We had to get the cat protection league in to get them all out. You’d go out there and the whole back yard would move… it was all the cats sitting there watching you. As soon as you’d move they’d move.

Caxton Press:
it wasn’t flash upstairs there was old furniture, old desks. The smell of whisky and cigarettes.

When we did the alterations, it had had a fire. There was an oven or something in the back that was all charred. Its obviously been a residence and a shop. At some stage it was a bakery, for a while a guy called Charlie Rich had it. He was an antiques stealer, so it was an antiques shop. He would’ve been there until the 50’s. When he retired he had a shed down the back. At some stage the Caxton Press took it over, and I’m not sure when…

The old fireplace was there. We left the cavity… there was a window in here that used to look West… 

Church:

It was musty. Timber floor. And up the big steep stairs at the back… they had a choir assembled. I remember floral services there. When I was a little kid I remember the Salvation Army came in with big banners,

Stratification and the Cut as Device
(Gordon Matta-Clark, Carlo Scarpa, the Colloseum)

6 Design
Site analysis and relationship
(description of each lost building with interview excepts)
The way the section is aligned, the way Sherborne street is aligned, the sun was in the front in the morning, down the side during the say and in the back at night. I used to live in the upstairs flat. I wasn’t living there at the time of the earthquake thank goodness, but I rented the downstairs to my brother and I had lots of different people at different times. And it was really just so fantastic up there because it had all of its old features. It had a beautiful Kauri floor and massively high ceilings. It was really warm because it was triple brick, and it got all day sun as well so it was a really, really nice place to live. 
Mnemonics and Methodology
Design and descriptions
Presentation layout

Compositions/ Parti diagram

There has been a recurring theme through all my design work, right from day 1. 

It is the faultline, also my 'parti' diagram.

I am yet to establish whether these are plans or sections. They may be both.

At any rate, useful to identify, especially when looking ahead to the next two sites I'll be designing for and an over-riding methodology.

Lyndon, Donlyn, Moore, Charles W. Chambers for a Memory Palace

This text has been crucial to my thinking as of late... 

(88)
Walls, however, make the most definitive borders, whether to a courtyard, a building, or a city. One of the images that has always been helpful to us in discussing our work is that of walls that make layers of space, with views through openings that overlap layer upon layer into the darkness or out to a view.
Surely walls that layer must be included in this Memory Chamber. The image that stays in my mind is not that of a building, but of the drawing you did once for a show at the University of Maryland concerning “Metaphors of Habitation.” In that drawing you layered openings of various sizes and shapes…
(89)
…in elevation as if they were on successive surfaces. The juxtaposition of shapes and the suggestion that bands of space might lie between them made this single drawing suggest an architecture that would reward exploration.
What made this image so suggestive, when there are few places that are actually made with opening syncopated that way? I think the answer is fairly simple – the drawing brings out in a static image what happens to us all the time as we use and experience places. Whenever we look out a framed window we see larger parts of a larger visual field, traces of another order, arbitrarily cut off by the confines of the opening. Then, as we shift position just a little, the field of vision changes; what we can see is…
(90)
…altered and the juxtaposition of shapes is different. When there is a porch or a set of trees or a succession of rooms through which we can look, the dynamic shifting of views that takes place as we move can become quite pronounced – even, sometimes, thrilling.
What’s more, what we can see though such layers is distinctly affected by how we move and look, by our participation in the place. It places initiative in the hands (or feet) of the observer.
This is a large part of our fascination with orchards, I think…diagonal views across cathedrals, where rows of columns lining the nave and side aisles appear to intersect in syncopated intervals as you move along the aisle, then at the transept crossing lead off in several directions at once.
(91)
But buildings of smaller scope can also be suggestive in this way – provided they have some thickness. The dynamic shiftings and layerings of views and outlook that occur when we move through space simply do not normally show up in elevations, drawings constructed as abstractions. Such drawings purposefully discount the vagaries of perspective vision, dependent as it is on an observer’s specific position in space.
Alas, all too many architects have presumed that the abstractions of the elevation are the real thing, have produced buildings whose walls have no thickness – no overlappings are possible, and there is simply one plane of transition between inside and outside. By eliminating the nuances that make it fun to move from one place to another within a set of spaces, such buildings severely diminish the pleasure of choosing your own positions within the structure.
There’s another type of layered wall that must be noted, even though it may seem entirely different. In these it is time that is layered, not space. Streets in European cities, especially in Italy, are often bounded by such walls, masonry structures that show the traces of successive stages of construction, decay, reconstruction, and alteration.
In the walls of Rome fragments of ancient stone carving suddenly appear in the midst of freshly cast plaster, tapping out a rhythm wholly independent of the building’s present uses. In Italian cities built first in the Medieval period, then rebuilt during the Renaissance, large areas of wall are like superimposed game plans: sweeping relieving arches of masonry are interrupted disrespectfully by elegantly framed Renaissance…
(92)
…openings of later-day windows of convenience. Following the trace of disparate building campaigns through these walls can lead the mind back through layers of time to expand the evocative power of the place. Layers of this sort cannot, of course, be fabricated in an instant.     

A bit of Inspiration from Europe

For the last six weeks I 've been traveling about Germany, Austria, Czech Rep., Croatia and Italy, soaking up the architectural richness about me. Hopefully this means I can now bring what I've absorbed into my project, bring to it a fresh mind and clarity about what it is that I intend to do and execute it with precision and excellence. 


My photos seemed to be in several clear categories; openings/doorways, steps, ground, layering, surfaces or fragments


These are some notes and photos I jotted down during the trip:

07.06.12

Today I visited Daniel Libeskind’s Military Museum in Dresden. It took a while to find the entrance to it, but when I did I was amazed. Yes, part of it is an older building and Libeskind has renovated it, but the contrast between new and old totally transformed the experience of the building.

Voids slashed through all floors of the building and allowed views down to up and up to down. Sloped and slanted walls were unbalancing, but in a good way. It was like walking for the first time. Libeskind’s insertion, visible from the front, is a platform which you can walk out onto on the top floor to see a view of Dresden. This is pretty scary, as it was like being in a cage, you could even see through the floor

Everything was beautifully presented and laid out

-the most unnerving part of the museum is on the 2^nd floor, and appears at first to be just a black shape/volume in the room.  Walking around it, you discover an entrance-way, and a sign saying ‘in here there are human remains, we have tried to treat them with the utmost of respect…’, and inside there are black closers and shutters… you don’t know what one will unveil. One was a human face… I shut this one very quickly!

08.06.12

Dresden’s castle: lower than the rest of the city (as the city is so old, it has been built up over time, by approx. 1m. The fortress provides a reference for the old ground level of the city. It also references to where the fortress has been flooded up to.

Deep deep windows

In, out

Up, down

Around and back through (movement)

10.06.12

Prague’s Jewish memorial. An entire building with walls covered in names, when they were born and when they died, from ceiling to floor. It is too much to absorb.

On the top floor are children’s drawings (of those who lived in the concentration camp). Some are shocking, others bright and happy – surprising.

Jewish graveyard. Up to 11 layers of bodies buried on top of each other because of lack of space within the confines of the Jewish quarter. Absolutely crammed fiull of gravestones. Estimates are up to 100,000 bodies

The entire Jewish quarter is lower than the rest of Prague because of its age. The Nazis decided to preserve it to keep it as an example/reference point of Jewish culture. That is why it still exists

11.06.12

Memorial to those who died fighting against communism

Large, sloping stairs, statues disappearing into distance -> like burning?

13.06.12

Whiteread’s memorial, Vienna: feel like there needed to be more space around it. Are the books too regular?

Cut into the ground to old foundations in central Vienna. Imagine depth, into depths

18.06.12

Fraunekirche, ceiling restored after bombing. There are photos in the foyer, but you can’t really tell otherwise

History of Hitler in city

Golden brick lines a memorial to those who used to use a particular lane to avoid haling hitler at a series of plaques

Plaques now gone, only outline traces remain. Idea that people are intrigued by the subtle memorials and then go to do their own research about them, not able to disrespect them (unlike in Berlin, for example). Do people actually do this, though? No one really seems to see them.

19.06.12

Links to the ground (subway system)

Connection/disconnection (a type of connection too)

Collective, outside, vertical/horizontal cuts through layers. Individual/outside.

20.06.12

Dachau. Things like this need witnesses. They need people to say ‘this cannot happen again’

It is unbelievable how much of Munich is seeped in this history

‘the dead, a reminder and a warning to the living’

Footprints of the bunkers

Herzog and de Mueron’s football stadium: semi-transparent, wonderfully detailed cladding

23.06.12

I like the peepholes in the Nuremburg castle walls. You look back and catch glimpses through something you hadn’t seen before

24.06.12

Typography of terrors. Slight ramps parallel to the wall.

 Footprints of old buildings/ prison highlighted and left visible underground. These buildings became/ were discovered later in the ‘80s, only through excavation: ‘lets dig!’

‘it happened, therefore, it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say.’ – Primo Levi

www.memorial museums.org <-database

layers, like the cities built up by layers

-there seems to be something very significant about being able to say

-> ‘this was here’

-> this happened at this particular time, date

It puts a certainty on the memories, they are then substantiated, validated, and provoke them

-use of ground, layers, revealing and concealing is evident throughout these memorials

+ Berlin walls looking like my plaster models

Eisenman: deliberately walking to it, but it took me by surprise. It was just suddenly there… and it was so grey.

It wasn’t as disorientating as I thought it would be. It was all in a grid, so you always knew the way out. The undulating ground and staggered blocks did suddenly mean you were deep down, then high up

-it is as though the revealing occurred when going underground. Outside, upwards, the concrete blocks were all the same, you became part of it. Underground, in the museum area, the blocks became identifiable.. reach one represented a photograph, a story, an event, a family, a place.

Ceiling, information volumes, varying heights from ground, but never touching it

Gedenkstatte Berlin Wall. Location of remaining Berlin wall and another memorial set-up, to the victims of the wall

It is good and strange how throughout Berlin there are tiny pieces of the wall are left in certain locations

25.06.12

Daneil Libeskind’s memorial museum. Subterranousely connected – because that is history, it is disconnected?

Not very much material evidence of the Jews in Berlin: just objects, that’s why there are void spaces in the museum on every floor

It was very confusing inside

I think the art work “Fallen leaves” was the most striking. The sound of steel echoing in the tall empty void.

Catching glimpses through windows was also especially effective

Similarities between two Jewish museums: attempt to individualise and personalize history. They also show WWII in context

It is clear that what we do today is a continuation of history

Bebelplatz/ Rachel Whiteread: no explamnation, a bit ambiguous for onlookers? AGAIN: the ground!

Neue Wache: a building badly damaged in the b0ombings, reconstructed, the new in brick. Dedicated to soldiers who lost their lives, within it are the remains of one unknown soldier. Opening to the sky. AGAIN, openings.

02.07.12

San Michelle Island. A lot of people buried here, a lot of them vertically. The complex has developed over time, consisting of open spaces with headstones, gridded, vertical volumes (8 feet high, people buried 6 x 12 on each side of the blocks), and churches. The last addition by Chipperfield: light/water corners.

05.07.12

The Colosseum. Once inside, it is clear how much of it has been reconstructed, though it is still amazing that this ancient structure exists! The grand scale is one thing, I am transfixed by all the layers and opening, the different materials and views through to different walls, to outside. It is exactly my language.

06.07.12

Crypts of popes underneath St Peter’s church

08.07.12

I am amazed by all the vents, grated ones, but depths beneath the ground still visible as we walk along the footpaths

09.07.12

Scarpa castle, Verona. Layers, views, cuts everywhere… but so subtle, so elegantly done to become part of the original building. The new/old is obvious, but neither take away from the other. They compliment, and do not compete despite their different styles and materials