Reprogramando el Domo del Milenio
Architecture and collecting have a lot in common. Serious collectors, take great measures to catalogue, and organize their collections. As in architecture, the collection deals with the arrangement and grouping of different functional elements that when together conform a rationalized whole. The art collection is different form the regular collection because it often exposes or demystifies the collection itself, in other words, the art collection is critical. This research project focuses on how an art collection could affect architecture. The first step of the project was to research about collections and to start a collection. The act researching was treated as part of collecting so the collection became about the collector’s websites. The collection was organized recording the links I followed while on the website thus exposing an underworld inhabited by the collector’s tastes and artifacts (assuming that if one has a link in one’s website, one should have interest in that subject-matter). The collection was catalogued and saved on the surface of a CD-Rom and materialized by acquiring a physical element the collection referred to.
The collection, since it was a snapshot of a certain collector’s interest in one moment in time, was stored in formaldehyde and vinegar to preserve it. A collector’s time capsule. The objects in the substance will eventually disintegrate but the aluminum surface on the CD-Rom will outlast them. The project was to redesign the decaying millennium dome and use the collection as some sort of filter to uncover the new program. The millennium dome, was divided into zones that superposed with the collection (by subject-matter) started hinting of a possible program. The project became a model of a city redefining the relation between its functional elements through a collection.
After superposing the collection with the dome zones, the volume occupied by the old buildings and the profile of the dome were used to redefine the zones, creating programmatic boundaries. The new zones will overcome the dome without destroying it. The dome will decay, but will maintain its essence through the new program.
The programmatic elements in the new zones where connected to the nearest similar activity with linear passages that sliced the blobs. These passages connected the dome back to the city. The distance these passages spanned was manifested in its width.The dome and the new ‘zones’ were used as a limit for the new connections. When they penetrated, they where kept inside as interior conditions.
Each zone phenomenologically reflected its subject-matter. Hence for example, the landscape-matter blob becomes landfill that will change and grow overtime. The new dome and its zones, serve as a limit for the new city program to materialize. They become a new type of zoning.
Diseño