Student: Natalie Bezarashvili
Professor: David Bostanashvili
Theme: Courthouse
Master's level course project. Year I. 2014.
Magdolona Ban's painting "Legend of Balaton" lies on the threshold of surrelistic and naive traditions. Studio Poetics of Architecture is in constant search for new paradigms and artistic provocations. A cow stretched out on a meadow is a truly intriguing image in the world. Poetics of Architecture faces contemporary epistemic situation where signifier and signified, form and symbolic content drift apart. Therefore, wrapping the court into a cow-shaped volume does not imply slightest symbolic hint. A free signifier (the Cow) is suspended without a fixed signified.
Second paradigm of the project is related to the theme of the spaces occupied by the walls. Louis Kahn was the first to investigate and find inspiration in medieval castles of Scotland where solid wall and void of the room occupy almost equal space. To each function there corresponds a single spatial configuration.
The project of the courthouse allocates each function to a separate individual space. The place that the walls take are at first considered as an impenetrable solids. Next step we imagine a void inside the solid wall with transparent surfaces. This void is a kind of space not being categorized in any terms. History of architecture does not know a prototype for such spaces. The void inside the wall is a kind of parallel universe. In the proposal this space is taken by the Nature. Decontextualized cultural signs (furniture), are scattered on the lawns inside the voids of the walls.