In Saturday's post we mentioned Rick Owens' block-shaped interior design pieces inspired by the German bunkers that were made from concrete and used during the Second World War. In that post we highlighted how the designer conceives them as futuristic temples and as architectural elements marking the birth of brutalism. Let's continue the brutalist theme by looking at three projects by architect Marc Leschelier that call to mind in their shapes and configurations the solid and brutalist German bunkers.
A lecturer at Paris-Malaquais School of Architecture and founder of the Unbuilt Archive*, an archive specialized in Paper Architecture based in Paris, Leschelier has developed three projects that could be filed under the brutalist category - "Shadows Cinema" or "Solar Form (Warm Cinema)" and "Solar Duct (Converter)".
"Shadows Cinema" (2016) is a model of a movie theatre to be built in a desert or in a place far from parasitic lights. The building takes the shape and the hieratical and monumental solemnity of a temple: its architecture is indeed made up of large blocks of concrete entangled, cast, and locked in cavities dug into the ground.
At nightfall, the building is surrounded by a bright light while a semicircular peripheral rail guides large masts on which spotlights are mounted. Architecture is used as the principal material of the cinematographic experience: its shadows extend on the ground to the cinema screen in its centre, their displacement and superimposition on the screen generates an abstract film.
The cinema has no seating space, eliminating in this way any kind of restrictive points of views, but the spectator moves freely in this area, with the possibility of accidentally or unintentionally entering the phenomenology of the film.
Though the screen delimits the film, it actually extends far beyond that, to the ground and to the architecture, while sand displaced by the wind, stars and animal sounds are all parameters that become filmic matter.
Leschelier developed his language of blocks further in "Solar Form", a building consisting in a pure conductor of light and a hieroglyph.
Designed to be situated close to a volcanic environment, this architecture is placed on charred ground and conducts sunlight into its interstices. Composed entirely in textured red concrete, it seeks to imitate an image of fire, but also evokes the shape of Oriental temples and samurai armours, while calling to mind also the exoskeleton of an insect.
Two languages confront each other in this model - the language of the structure and that of the added forms. The building is specifically oriented towards the sun, and conducts the luminous phenomenon, whilst simultaneously overlapping it with a formal mimesis.
Leschelier is fascinated by the power of the sun: a resident (since September 2017) for one year at the Villa Medici in Rome, he presented in October a large architectural model entitled "Solar Duct (Converter)".
Displayed as part of a group show comprising also Davide Balula, Wilfrid Almendra, Christoph Büchel, Denis Savary, Caroline Mesquita, Polys Peslikas, Roque Rivas, Claire Lavabre and Odysseas Yiannikouris among the others, "Solar Duct (Converter)" is both an allegory of the Pantheon of Rome and a radicalisation of the architectural form into a pure light conductor.
The architecture is entirely reduced to a pure light conductor and the spatial properties of this building allow a specific phenomenon - the appearance of an image.
Indeed, when the sun is in the perfect alignment of the obelisk and the monumental cylinder, the projected shadow forms an image, visible at a specific time of day. This image represents an eye and calls to mind the oculus (eye) of the Pantheon of Rome, in an allegorical form.
This project is a reinterpretation of the phenomenon of the Dies Natalis, which occurs every 21st of April in the Pantheon, when the building acted as a huge luminous spotlight to illuminate the Emperor. Leschelier uses therefore at their best the primitive materials of architecture - light and shadow - to create a new and modern language of forms.
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