A
And it came to pass, not to stay
Mapping of shadows in near context, showing the different characters of the baroque garden, the solar energy park and the oil refinery
Navn
Pernille Vincents Johansen
Uddannelsesgrad
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Arkitektur
Institut
Bygningskunst, By og Landskab
Program
Arkitektur & landskab
År
2024
The project is a public space in Kalundborg, Denmark, inspired by the typology of rest areas placed alongside highways. A rural context characterized by production of energy, technical requirements. The project seeks to situate the body in a landscape characterized by the body’s absence in the landscape. A place where the energy is omnipresent, but only experienced in a sudden reflection when passing the nearby solar energy park or the fleeting smoke from the chimneys of the neighboring oil refinery. In a restless landscape, the project seeks to dwell in the states of energy experienced through a passerby's momentary stay.
The title And It Came to Pass, Not to Stay is borrowed from an essay by the American architect Buckminster Fuller, in which he discusses energy and the management of land and resources. He criticizes management of land, resources and the distribution of wealth. How the energy produced by workers, is owned by a landowner and not the producer of its wealth.
The title refers to energy, and thereby wealth, as being transitory and always in motion.
Semiotics have been central in reading and understanding the context and the surrounding landscapes. In the text Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture, Umberto Eco writes about architectural elements and how they both denote a function and connote an ideology. Architecture is communication. In this project, motif is used as a broad concept for figures, spatial organization, architectural elements, materials, scale, dimensions, etc. The motifs have a physical appearance and communicate in connection to their cultural context, which can be used to inscribe the project into other contexts, narratives, or structures.
Sampling has been a method of incorporating already existing material, and the method uses semiotics to understand and borrow from its context and create new relationships. In this connection, this quote from the American architect Robert Venturi has been central to my process:
”Through unconventional organization of conventional parts he (the architect) is able to create new meanings within the whole. If he uses convention unconventionally, if he organizes familiar things in an unfamiliar way, he is changing their contexts, and he can use even the cliché to gain a fresh effect. Familiar things seen in an unfamiliar context become perpetually new as well as old.”
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)
Context
Kalundborg is a town in North-West part of Sjælland, located by a fjord, and the town has approximately 17,000 inhabitants. The chosen area lies two kilometers south of Kalundborg. An area characterized by industry and agriculture, intersected by roads and fences with occasional farms and houses.
Based on the anthropologist Anna Tsing's text Patchy Anthropocene, I have worked with an understanding of the landscape as composed of patches. These patches have their own internally organizing logics adapted to their function or narrative. In the landscape and the meeting with other patches, they are sewn together in transitions, which in some instances can be thickly drawn and uncompromising boundaries and elsewhere more frayed, broken, or porous. Tsing's text highlights what defies the boundaries, moves across the patches, and draws attention to the constructed structures and logic of the landscape.
The project focuses on three patches in the chosen context: the estate Lerchenborg, an oil refinery, and a solar park. The context is a diverse composition of typologies and narratives that all relates to the production of energy. The means of production takes part in the organization of the individual patch and how it relates to its context – it shapes the landscape. The oil refinery as an industrial complex where energy moves from the deep underground across oceans and national borders. The solar park as a landscape showing energy production related to the technology converting sun light to electricity – a landscape where the body is absent. Lerchenborg, the estate with a baroque garden, formerly an architectural tool to perform the estate’s centralized power in an agricultural society.
Architectural motifs
Mirroring has been a main motif in the project. This has for example been used through a spatial organization such as in the symmetry axis of the baroque layout, through reflective shiny surfaces as in the solar cell park and through the mirroring in a water surface before the water evaporates; here a state change like in the distillation plant of the oil refinery.
Mirroring is a technique that repeats but distorts and changes the motif. One of the shown pictures is a photography of a painting from the late 1600s. The painter is unknown, as it is a portrait of King Charles I, who was sentenced to death and beheaded. His supporters painted this kind of portraits, anamorphoses. A distortion that can only be read through the right angle or through a reflection. This portrait can only be seen in a cylindrical mirror placed at a specific point in the painting.
Despite its distortion, the portrait still contains the portrait, and through the distortion, a layer is added to the portrait's story. The reflection is crucial in two different ways of seeing the motif. Which picture is the distorted one?
Mirroring is used as a way to explore motifs and their context – as in the abovementioned quote from Venturi: How long does a motif belong to a particular context? What does it take for the perception of the context to become something else? What happens when you combine otherwise separate motifs? Does the meaning dissolve, is it reinforced?
Project proposal
The project transforms an existing unused parking lot into a public space for lunch breaks, hangouts, playing, stretching, waiting, random encounters, and planned meetups.
The main layout from the former parking lot is preserved. In the eastern part of the site there is a square from where a road stretches towards a rotation. The stretch and rotation mirrors the trajectory of the road and roundabout outside the site.
A new driveway is added enhancing the long, mirrored stretch, dramatizing the entry to the public space by car. With long walls used as barriers, securing the mirrored road, the view of the square is limited to the rear mirror in the car.
The strict choreography of the driveway into the site is in contrast to the open square where the movement of cars, bikes and visitors by foot can move freely across the space, negotiating when and where one moves. This space consists of a drive-in bio, water puddles, bike parking, the walking entrance and a solar cell pavilion for sheltering from the sun. The landscape of the square is altered creating a cupped asphalt surface collecting rainwater as evaporating mirrors.
Plan, 1:500
Site
Solar cell pavilion for lunch breaks and sun shelter.
Lookout post and slide. Sampling oil refinery chimneys and the baroque interior of Lerchenborg.
Visualization
Using the mirrors of the car as point of views onto the site.
Rear mirror visualization of solar cell house, reflection in puddle of water and a parked car.
Visualization showing point of view in a car in the drive-in cinema with three landscapes at once. The oil refinery can be seen in the rear mirror, a movie is being projected on the screen and the space around the car is visible through the wind shield.
Wall zoom-ins
Throughout the site a border creates an outline. The border exists in different variations: a curb, a concrete barrier, a wall, a hedge and a chain link fence.
Wall surrounding the driveway into the site. Variations on borders - hedge, concrete barrier, concrete wall, chain link fence.
Entrance to the site by foot. Pavement tiles marks the entrance, where the surrounding wall is cut up, opening up the site for visitors.
Wall seen from inside the site. Curb like vessels for rainwater creating evaporating mirrors.
Model sketches of landscape details (excerpt - more can be seen in the physical exhibition)
Relief showing layers of asphalt and paint overlapping as a method of working with the existing material of the parking lot.
Relief of a water puddle mirroring its context. Half a heart shows up.
Det Kongelige Akademi understøtter FN’s verdensmål
Siden 2017 har Det Kongelige Akademi arbejdet med FN’s verdensmål. Det afspejler sig i forskning, undervisning og afgangsprojekter. Dette projekt har forholdt sig til følgende FN-mål
