ABSTRACT
In contemplating architectural form, we have no desire to honestly illustrate the inner workings of a building towards the outside or for that matter make legible a project’s generative diagram. Neither are we interested in elaborate treatments of skin to produce some new type of ornamentation or surface effect. Inevitably, as we perpetually rearrange arrays of atoms, architects need to consider the visual and visceral effects of how we experience our new compositions. Volumetric definition of a building mass reflects the negotiation that takes place between internal and external domains, realms that are never one and the same. In this, the volume both hints and hides. We are interested in pursuing forms that resist clarity. As in the fable of the blind men discovering an elephant for the first time, 1 the volumetric presence of the project is unresolved. Form shifts between the discernible and the amorphous, the sharp and the blurred. Alluding to the essential 82character of a private arts organization that offers space for both the making and experiencing of contemporary art, the proposal for Amant investigates formal expression that oscillates between articulation and ambiguity. Creating this tension: a form not invested in legibility, but flirting with it (Figures 6.1, 6.2, 6.3).
