Our work for the Venice Biennale 2012 is made up of seven aluminium slabs and ninety-six brass rods. The aluminium slabs are stacked and spaced, using the brass rods as pillars, to create a three-dimensional grid-like structure.
The slab/pillar structure, optimised in Le Corbusierís Maison Domino, represents an ideal tectonic system. When exposed to lateral forces, stabilising elements such as stairs, walls, and diagonals are necessary to stabilise the structure and to freeze the image of the structural ideal.
Our object puts the Maison Domino into play, by focusing on the moment before the stabilising act, before the image is frozen. The imperfections in the structure ñ the non-rigid joints between pillar and slab ñ make the object unstable. This condition opens a multitude of unpredictable variations in the spatial configuration. The object thus changes from an ideal Cartesian grid into an open-ended structure, one responsive to the outside influences of visitors and to the Nordic Pavilion itself.
