Img 1: The Cloud Gate, Chicago, Illinois, by Anish Kapoor.

Premise

In a number of major cities across the world, public squares, parks, and plazas have been important urban vehicles in defining their morphology and even their culture, while at the same time being reflective of them. Throughout history, they have long been places where much architectural intelligence and public resources have been expended. When done right, these spaces act as a focal point for the civic and social life of a city. When designed poorly, though, they can act as a black hole, sucking the life out of a city centre.

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Img 2: The 10 Cal Tower by Supermachine Studio in Bangkok.

Activators

For long now, public art and sculpture have been gainfully employed and commissioned to infuse life into dead/abandoned urban public spaces. Similarly, there exist hundreds of examples of such successful sculptural works of art that have become the very identity of successful urban squares across the world: squares that would have been but unadorned city blocks in their absence. Not only do they eliminate “barrenness” that often leads to the demise of such squares, they create an engagement with the public that is hard to achieve for either squares or the buildings circumscribing them, simply by means of being increasingly accessible to the general public.

All of this while also primarily fulfilling the most basal purpose of art: to express something, in the process imparting new meaning and purpose especially to places with a robust history.

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Img 3: The Boston City Hall Plaza in need of improvement.

Squares

Agoraphobia has been a common phenomenon that has been identified to be associated with a number of large squares. That coupled with the increasingly large amount of traffic that has been funneled through these squares since their inception leads to the public feeling somewhat disconnected from such squares and spaces. Additionally, squares in many major cities have prominent histories, cultures, or events associated with them. A number of these squares, however, have over the years transformed into large stretches of asphalt allowing people to simply gather or pass through sans any engagement.

Public spaces that speak to the people about their culture or history or something that people can personally engage with have indubitably seen more interaction.

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Img 4: The Vessel in Hudson Yards, New York by Thomas Heatherwick.

Architecture x Sculpture

Architecture and the Fine Arts have had several intersections in the past, with each discipline mutually benefitting from the other. In the modern age of parametric modelling, material innovation, malleability, and newfound technologies of production, the intersection is broader than ever, particularly in the case of Architecture.

Several buildings, habitable or otherwise, have sculptural qualities infused in their form and have led to striking interventions that find common ground with each of these disciplines. Eschewing the ordinary, these interventions have proven to be fertile ground for architects to flex their creativity and bring some interesting colours and proportions to their settings.

Can Architecture and Sculpture somehow combine to create something iconic, something that enlivens these public squares?

Img 5: The Wave, Die Welle, Frankfurt, by Schneider +Schumacher.

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Img 6: A rendering of Junya Ishigami's design for the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion.

Brief

The challenge is to design an architectural sculpture with an intention to enliven a public square in the city of Paris.

The intent of the intervention would be to combine the functional qualities of architecture with the artful qualities of a sculpture. The final outcome is to be a built form that can act as an activator of the identified urban square in Paris: the Place de la Concorde.

The designed structure may not be fit for habitation on a prolonged basis for people, but it should be able to house them, in an attempt to let them experience its sculptural qualities, as if magnified to the size of an actual building.

Simply stated, it should be an intervention that is built to architectural construction drawings, yet is sculptural in the way it looks and is conceived.

The inforgraphic attempts to further differentiate between the kind of intervention required by this competition (architectural), and architecture sculptures. When closely examined, it can be seen that the distinction between the two, though narrow, can be found in terms of scale, mobility of the user, utility, and material, but primarily, the method of inception, its construction and the purpose it serves in the public realm.

Paris

Paris is the capital of France, and also its most populous city. One of Europe's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science and the arts. Paris is the second most frequented destination in the world, and is globally known for its art museums, cathedrals, and cultural and culinary tourism. The Eiffel Tower, the Notre-Dame de Paris, the Sienna River, Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre are only some of the internationally and immediately recognisable landmarks that Paris houses.

Intervention

Place de la Concorde

Site

Within the square, the zones marked in yellow have been identified as potential areas for intervention. Participants may choose to design the architecture sculpture within any or all of the four quarters of the square. The structure could be singular, multiple, integrated, contiguous or isolated, but in no case should it impede with the fountains or the Obelisk in the central part of the square. To inspire the most creative solutions, there are no restrictions on shape, form or size, but the height of the intervention needs to be restricted to 15m, in order to protect the vantage of the Obelisk, standing 22.5m high.

Objectives

The above objectives can be a point of beginning to conceive this design. Participants can assume a mixed demographic including tourists before initiating their design process. The context must be thoroughly respected in all cases.

Sculpt[r] 2020

Overview