The Vitrine City

"To make an atlas is to reconfigure space, to redistribute it, in short, to redirect it: to dismantle it where we thought it was continuous; to reunite it where we thought there were boundaries."

- Didi-Hubermann

The city is a museum - a curatorial reorganisation that showcase our art, sciences, history, artefacts and lives.

JOURNAL OF SILOPOTREBLA - TEMPLE OF DRAGONS

I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.
- Joseph Conrad

That was the motivation behind the Great Exhibition. The curiosity of the crowd that the exotic artefacts from afar or the past that we have little knowledge of. Albertopolis has remained its core function as an active site in producing and consuming knowledge.

The temple of dragons is an abstracted form of knowledge consumption - the way we worship knowledge, artefacts encapsulated by glass vitrines, observing these objects to search for truth in our universe.

The project asks whether the social ritual of museum-visiting can be an object of interest, and whether that can

AN INTER-DIMENSIONAL COMPASS

This is pataphysical device. Based on the exemplification of the gyroscopic precession, the device is met with an addition of a 3-dimensional zoetrope where the illusive 'dancing baby' would pass through the bicycle wheel if the optimal rotational speed and frequency of strobe light is achieved.
In the journey of finding true North, one will finally find 4th dimension.

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FOUR DIMENSIONS OF THE VITRINE CITY

The Top dimension simulates Steeples of Albertopolis as Islands being travelled by Dr. Faustroll while the Lower Dimension unifies Albertopolis as a seamless interior.
The tetrahedral sandwich layer of vitrines is occupied in two levels, with the upper level being occupied vitrines of activity surrounded by corridors for the public; and the lower level being a sea of circulation separated by thin glass planes.

DISORIENTATION - PATAPHYSICS AND GLASS

One who has become all eyes cannot see
To try and understand us
to court misunderstanding
Not to know but to go on
Anything is a mirror
There are two endless directions
In and Out

Location

Status

Tutors

Reference

Albertopolis, South Kensington London

Academia | Denys Lasdun Award for Excellence in Architecture

Miraj Ahmed, Martin Jameson

Alfred Jerry

Andrea Branzi

Konrad Waschmann

Danteum, Terragni

Agnes Martin