additions
to the whole
without making the whole neither better nor worse
 Patisserie Olives
Mayfair London 1996 This patisserie for the rich had a small budget. We made an assumption that these wealthy future customers did not want to see the process, the struggle of the client and his architect to fully complete the patisserie, but rather they wanted to see the finished product. Therefore, this project was phased but with the intention to look completed at all the stages. This contradicts the edict that nothing can be added or taken away from a good work of architecture.
We believed that our aim to develop a structure that can assert additions is a worthwhile experiment. Architectural precedents deal with additions to the completed structures by distinguishing between the main structure and the additions. Adolf Loos, for example, writes about a distinction between architecture and furnishing. Concepts of "participation" from sixties and seventies anticipate additions by distinguishing shells and interventions. Even the recent concepts of indeterminate architecture distinguish between initial structures and their unknown destinies. |
|
|||||
) view from bench towards cake display |
)
view towards bench and coffee stand |
)
view towards bakery sales counter |
||||
| |
||||||
) first phase with ten seats |
This project develops a composition that can have things added into its main structure without becoming neither better nor worse. But, rather than opening itself as a composition of endless possibility, the project was channeled towards one solution, by impossible to rationalize principles. Our main role was to identify and appropriately apply these required "principles": (our errors are their witnesses). The emergent principles could be listed in the follow way: (1) The relationships between the elements needed to be of no particular kind and the objects need to appear independent. Pragmatic relationships or very elementary relationships were appropriate. (2) The space was to be perceived as a separator. The objects could not form the space but were somehow to squeeze it out. So the space was set in motion becoming soft, liquidy and twirly. (3) The moderation of all elements of the project was needed. The scale, although the project seemed to be open to a mix of scales, was tending towards the moderate or small. (4) The objects needed to show a degree of deliberation, just as was the whole. (5) The objects, just as their details, like drawers, legs, edge details, needed to be plain without diagonals or dynamic curves. (6) But, the objects also needed to be delicate, on tall legs, smooth and silky and colors to be radiant. Ironically, this responds to Edward Burke's idea that an aesthetic object must be relatively small, of delicate structure, effortless and have vivid but not too bright colors. This is of interest to me because of possible similarities between structural principles Burke might have assumed in a work of art, and the structural principles of this project. I expect that they were similar to his ideas about political structural principles still present in English society. |
)
)
|
||||
) curzon street )
two customers and one waiter )
ten customers and three waiters |
)
last phase with twenty seats |
) view from the entrance |
||||
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
phase one ) |
|
phase two ) |
|
phase three ) |
|
phase four ) |
|
phase five ) |
||
| . |
.
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
Credits: Design: Zoka Zola, Natalia Maximova Photos: Peter Pfanner |
