PAVILION STUDY - AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME 2001

Marion O. and Maximilian E. Hoffman Fellowship in Architecture 2000-2001

Architectural 'follies' have played an increasingly important role in contemporary architecture. They create an opportunity to comment on architecture by sketching in built form. Follies are not architecture; they are installations with the ability to envelop us in a spatial experience. Roman ruins such as those at Villa Adriana and Ostia Antica have been the main spring of my folly. They suggest in their dynamic state, multiple possibilities for creating contemporary architecture. I am interested in the power of their fragments; bits of buildings, which orient, contain, and suggest a past and future simultaneously. The eye uses these fragments to reconstruct the buildings past while the holes, gaps and scars allude to the ruin's future, the death of it's architecture? At this stage of disappearing, the missing building becomes as important as it's remaining fragments. In Pavilion I have attempted to capture this balance.