COPENHAGEN PAVILION
Client: Competition Entry in collaboration with dancer Emily Coates
Services: Architecture, Graphic Design
Our city is a rush of linear movement, shaped by the architecture of our urban environment: a dense criss-crossing pattern of transit lines and sidewalks, roadways and garden paths. Our plan for a platform for Copenhagen Contemporary proposes a temporary centering amidst that messy pattern, a clearly demarcated central pavilion that draws us back to the fundamental form of radial movement. Our lives are bounded by radial movement at the smallest and largest scales of our universe, from the movement of electrons about the nucleus of an atom to the movement of our planet around the sun. Our project, entitled Radial Movement, is nested within the hustle and bustle of Copenhagen and provides a moment of focus, an opportunity to pause our everyday routines and experience the transformative power of public art. Radial Movement is a spatial installation that captures architecture at its most essential: there are no walls, but light wood screens; there is no enclosed boundary, but a light gesture suggesting inside and outside; there is no roof, but the trace of an implied dome overhead.
Developed in conjunction with ‘Everything We Know,’ a durational performance installation developed by Emily Coates, dancer-writer-choreographer, this structure draws inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s 1974 lecture ‘Everything I Know,’ a 42 hour lecture that traverses the wide interests and expertise of Fuller, a man that Noguchi called a ‘messiah of ideas.’ That lecture was a celebration of an idiosyncratic individual, a lone genius on stage addressing a rapt audience. Our structure provides a platform for a radically different kind of performance: one that is pluralistic, diverse, and global. Taking the form of a deconstructed dome, the structure is a modular system of arching vertical spines and horizontal rods, allowing it to be made of small, affordable components. If placed on grass, each rail base plate could be staked into the ground; if on concrete, small bolts could provide anchors. Formed on a radial grid constructed of 24 segments, the structure’s form follows the cycle of the day. Like a sundial, the shadows of its asymmetric form can map out time. The installation includes ground graphics of lines radiating outward from the dome’s center; these lines can be used to provide practical wayfinding and schedule information for the events of Copenhagen Contemporary, and those lines could stretch outward across the city, appearing in distant neighborhoods. If Fuller’s completed geodesic dome exhibits the complete and bounded mastery of ideas of a single individual, the dome-in-formation implies the unfinished, the on-going, the nebula of a swirling body of ideas. Coates’ ‘Everything We Know’ is a malleable performance organism created by artists and scientists working across a range of disciplines: dance, theater, sculpture, music, particle physics, and astrophysics. Rather than structuring this performance on a stage in front of rows of an audience, Radial Movement encourages the installation to be viewed in the round, as spectators can come and go or sit and observe for a more theatrical perspective.
Through its loose sense of enclosure, its simple form, and its flexible construction, Radial Movement is suitable for many types of programming. For an immersive dance event, performers can weave inside and outside the structure as viewers gather in the round. For an artists talk, the structure can act as a classroom, seating a group of twenty inside around a speaker. For a musical performance, a small stage can be erected within and simple lighting can create a lantern-like glow across the curves of the dome.