Friday, June 15, 2007

The Concrete Circus

The following project deals with a dichotomy of architecture in "object" and "event". The concept of the Circus as a procedure of rupture between those two.
The Circus is a mobile "ghost" structure. Incomplete, indeterminant and packable. The teleology of the building and destruction of a concrete circus is a metonymization of its legitimate function: the ephemeral erection and the packing within a bunch of trucks. It is a metonymy of the uncertainty of its origin and destination. In other words the tent & truck architecture is being substituted by cement & dynamite, as Sant 'Elia quoted "Burn it every fifty years..". It's calamity becomes part of the show; the best and most trained acrobats and magicians participate in that unique and unrepeatable extravaganza.

Housing of the Event&Packing__________Solidification around the Event&Explosion

The "idea" of the Circus, that legitimize a tensed fabric becomes an ad-hoc built void. The moment that the first concrete circus is been built, through that architectural rupture the figure and the typology of the circus gain substance. The building becomes part of the show. Becomes the paraphernalia of illusion, jokes and the grotesque. It doesn't cover, but houses the circus. It's once fragmented and scattered spaces saturate a dense, centripetal spiral infrastructure. Concrete backstage spaces and open air-roof for rehearsing included.

A series of metonymies begins with the destruction and the building of New concrete Circuses. And while the ephemeral montage-able materials of the circus constitute a generic structural kit that seaks urban voids to unfold and scatter, a permanent monolithic structure will perform the opposite: It shall be a concretization of the transition from the "urban outside" to the working place of a clown, thus the fluid, almost abstract function of the circus is being metonymized onto a constant transforming, refreshing and doubtful redefinition of the Circus Idea, through experimentation per place and time. It is an endless architectural experiment but maintaining the same client and generic Idea. The phenomenon of the Circus prevails over the fluidity of the program; Elephants added, guest magicians invited, non-stop moving from place to place, new urban contexts...New symbols, new structural methods, new materials, new -isms and colors, new posters and circus trademarks...