Spatial Crusades

The Spatial Crusades map is a formal vignette to further the aspirations of the Paper Trail Atlas. The map is the imposition of the first six crusades from Western Europe to Jerusalem. It is the intention of these projects to continue as a formal research project to develop a means of encapsulating space and regaining the didactic meaning that Victor Hugo describes as being lost in his statement “Ceci tuera cela” – the death of architecture occurring at the invention of the printing press as architecture became redundant to the written word in relaying ecclesiastical narrative.

Whilst the project was a formal illustration it continues the narrative work of the Printed Aedicules project, the connection of the digital with history and the interest of didactic / narrative form. The form imposes three maps into the atlas, firstly that of the crusades, leading to a historic plan of Jerusalem and the initial beginnings of a viewing cone, a plane lifted from the map to hide and reveal part of its content.

The Spatial Crusades project is exhibited in the 2010 Royal Academy Summer Show in London.

Printed Aedicule

Library for the Museum of Ancient Manuscipts, Tivoli

Located in the ancient town of Tiber (now Tivoli) the Library for the Museum on Manuscripts was conceived as a disparate annex from the Villa d’Este – the location of the Museum of Ancient Manuscripts. The villa and surrounding gardens are a UNESCO Heritage site set within the constricted urban setting. It was determined that the library would be better suited in a site near the museum but located at a distance that did not effect the historic fabric of the place.

The site is located near Pope Gregory XVI’s Villa Gregoriana and overlooks the Aniene’s falls – cascades that run through the travertine hills and spill out from the cliff sides across from the site.

The Library is located adjacent to a plaza and bridge (Via Gregoriana) at the entrance of the old town. This location offered a more public vantage point as the library integrates into the historic context using the remnants of Villa of Manlio Vopisco the library weaves through the historic and geological layers of the place from Tivoli to Tibur.

Project completed at the Bartlett School of Architecture under the tutelage of Dr. Marcos Cruz and Dr. Marjan Colletti

Encapsulated Fields – Reflective Scapes

New Faculty Building for T.U. Delft Bouwkunde

The competition was completed by Tobias Klein, Sara Shafiei and Johan Voordouw in 2008 as a short charette competition for the new T.U. Delft Bouwkunde building.. The project attempted to make a vertical series of streets and plazas that meandered through the programmed spaces of the school. Multi-storey void spaces punctuate the floors to be used as studios, crit spaces and exhibition voids that could be viewed from multiple vantage points by faculty and students to continually participate and view the activities within the school as they moved along its winding corridors. The submission was an extension of Herman Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer in Apeldoorn, the importance of the project was to form connections between the different years and studios to inspire the students and inform the faculty, forging a stronger school programme and a more cohesive student body.

The candy-stripped façade was inspired by the tulip fields that surround Delft, the coloured glass continually animating the offices and voids as light passes throughout the day bringing colour into the building and would be used as a playful marker to the surrounding city just outside of the the T.U. campus.

Book 03 – Printed Aedicules

The Printed Aedicules project developed a new mode of architectural expression for a library in Tivoli, Italy. The library was proposed for the Museum of Manuscripts located at the Villa d’Este.

The project sought to explore new spatial constructs within the confines of a book developing architectural space on and through the page. The books explored the process and spatial representation of manuscripts and book printing to blur the spaces imagined through reading and the physical spaces developed through construction.

The project was inspired by illustrative representation of architecture that separate narratives such as in medieval manuscripts. The Printed Aedicules books attempted to three-dimensionalise these spaces and lift them off the page. While it is recognised that manuscripts are not printed it were the spatial characteristics of manuscripts that were of interest. The term ‘printed’ was used more to describe the process of the making. Printing was used at each stage along the process – to print the original thesis, printing the pages to form the final book and lastly, through new processes, printing three-dimensional models of parts of the library using SLS.

All three books, the Altas, Tivoli Book and the Printed Aedicules Project were completed at the Bartlett, UCL. Dr. Marjan Colletti and Dr. Marcos Cruz, 2009.

Memory Archive

The Memory Archive in Tivoli was designed as a counterpoint to the Vatican Secret’s Archive in Rome. The archive sought to create secret spaces for the public to explore, search and hide. It developed a woven sequence of internal volumes that oscillated between hidden chambers and revealing labyrinths.

The project included three linked buildings that meandered through the site, inserting new vantage points from which to view the town and the people using the archive.

The first building at the north end of the site is the Public Archive. The platforms bridge an existing stair, which winds up the hill towards the old town and runs perpendicular to the street giving visual access through the building and site to experience the archive passively.

Adjacent to the public archive is the Private Archive; more hidden it is carved deep into the soft travertine hillside beneath the medieval houses that bound the site. Whilst more difficult to experience it offers better vantage points in which to hide and view others using the archive, revealing the full sublime richness of the spaces.

Lastly is the archive’s library, where memories left by individuals are organized, catalogued and stored. This structure rests most visibly in the town, adjacent to the entry bridge and town square at the south end of the site.

The Memory Archive seeks to convey the emotional aspects of what it would feel like to use a memory archive, to form an architectural expression and explore the atmospherics of a deeply personal space, one that encloses the wonderment of thoughts and the burden of secrets feeling both the heat and humidity or the cold chill and darkness.

Completed at the Bartlett, UCL. Dr. Marjan Colletti and Dr. Marcos Cruz, 2008.

Book 01 – The Paper Trail Atlas

The project examined the typology of the library for the Didactic Museum of Ancient Manuscripts in Tivoli, Italy. Rather than exploring the configuration of conventional spaces the project sought to explore the library through the scale of a book, the book becoming an expression physical and imagined spaces.

The Paper Trail Atlas was an attempt at making physical what would conventionally be drawn on the page. This ‘drawing’ indicating the route by which paper travelled from central China in 100 B.C. towards Europe, reaching southern Spain via North Africa in approx. 1056 A.D. and Fabriano / Tivoli 220 years later.

It was the diagram as built-form, using the paper trail as formal exploration, the model rising from the page to denote hierarchical importance such as were to trail cuts through the page as indicated in the image to the right to carve through the world map to reveal Tivoli and Rome in the pages below

Book 02 – The Pilgrimage of the Tiber

The project examined the typology of the library for the Didactic Museum of Ancient Manuscripts in Tivoli, Italy. Rather than exploring the configuration of conventional spaces the project sought to explore the library through the scale of a book, the book becoming an expression physical and imagined spaces.

The second book attempted to map through the page. The previous Paper Trail Atlas had extruded the drawing / diagram into a physical object, Book 02 intended to form a spatial pilgrimage linking disparate elements of the book, not as object resting on the page but as spaces through it. These images and texts served as the context for the models, which were used to heighten and make the reader aware of specific images and texts within the book. These models continually varied the readers viewpoint revealing and hiding elements within the book by shifting the formal and resultant spatial condition as one flipped through the pages.