When terrain becomes unstable, architecture oscillates between line, plane, and volume. At the beginning sand and structure occupy the same topographical coordinates. Much like the Superstudio image, architecture is ambiguous, expedient, and graphic. It starts as a drawing in the sand. As the site erodes, a square becomes a bench, and then a room, and then a cave, and then a matrix of rooms, and then a canopy. As the grid becomes deep, it disappears. The structure becomes determinate, and episodic. When the grid returns, it does so as a projection confined by the extents of the architecture.

The elevation begins as a line. Then it becomes a sill, then a wall, then a billboard. A surface becomes a chaise-lounge, becomes a sloped room with no ceiling, becomes a messy enfilade, becomes a ceiling with holes.

The pieces are a cruciform wall, a one-bay wall, a two-bay wall, a column, and two types of cones (a steep, involuted cone and a shallow involuted cone). The cones infill the grid, the walls and columns support the grid.

Sous la plage

Project Info

Program: Pavilion
Location: N/A
Year: 2018

The phrase, “Sous les paves, la plage,” popularized during the May 1968 movement in France, and the superstudio provocation of the grid inscribed in sand have territorial and material resonance. Sous La Plage (under the beach) imagines a third frame in the mythology constructed by these two images. In both “Sous les paves…” and Superstudio’s image, the beach is a datum of utopian projection. “Sous les paves...” suggests the beach is a latent terrain; subversive, obscure, and aimless. Superstudio impresses a grid into the sand producing the image of an ordered, rational, indeterminate surface. In either case, sand is a precarious coefficient that explicates the conflict between superstructure and base.

The beach is unstable. The matter of the beach (sand) is prone to the natural tyranny of air and sea, and the anguish of human activity. As an image, the beach is a source of joy, distress, fear, and a sense of calm. The beach is an interface; somehow permissive, porous, soft, severe, impermeable, and thick.

Sous La Plage is a proposal for an enigmatic pavilion that results from pushing the slippery image and materiality of the beach against an ostensibly stable architectural system.