Rotonda
Rotonda offers a vision of architecture as a “fluid spatiality” that balances material masses and communicates a sense of the tectonic despite a lack of static or immutable forms. Its movement echoes the human experience of space through a destabilization of spatial perception, a constant shifting of visual angles, and a distortion of its surrounding environment.
This dynamic of changing forms allows us to apprehend the "breath" of architecture. The Rotonda’s facade and interior space are in constant flux, giving birth to numerous horizons, or parallaxes in Steven Holl’s terminology. It portrays the nature of architecture in a different light from moment to moment: a permeable colonnade is replaced by a closed tower, fluid lines supplant functional right angles, the symmetry of the composition is broken only to reappear, and two-dimensional stelae standing in random positions take the place of a voluminous cylindrical pavilion.
The lightness of the Rotonda’s construction material (fabric) molds its forms into symbols of idealized human perception. Miming our sensation of the world around us in the abstract, it presents the human visual experience as an uninterrupted state of becoming.
Credits
- Concept: VOLNA
- © VOLNA (2021)