"Matter & Light" Josep Ferrando Architecture solo exhibition
An exhibition about Josep Ferrando's work in Architekturforum Aedes.
In the essence of the architectural project or the final built work resides an inherent duality: the place and the architect. The place always imposes itself, and architects adapt our method, gaze and, with it, a personal interpretation that will prevail during the process.
This duality between the immovable state of reality –the context and the territory-, and our interpretation of it is combined in the project and, finally, is realized in the built work.
The architectural work as a combination of matter and light. The volume –matter- in as far as the inanimate object: silent and still. And light –indefinite space-, like a void defined by matter: alive, moving, dynamic.
In order to reach this symbiosis between matter and light, between the definition of space and the habitable space, the architect works in a place with a context, a place that imposes itself and that cannot be ignored and that must be addressed
This architectural process is managed through many types of documents. A language is generated by the architect –personal- and specific –from the place- that - beyond being used by the architect to build- is the origin of a story that, in some cases, will arrive at its ultimate goal: to become spaces can be inhabited by people and can shelter new stories.
As an architect, I live in a duality between the craft and education; between practice and method.
The process feeds the ultimate goal of becoming a building, and the built work, feeds the process and the entire architectural project.
Therefore, how a place is reached is of as much importance as simply reaching a place.
Because its interpretation through process will become more tangible with the human condition, with time.
If the solid is not defined, there can be no habitable void. Without matter, there is no light, and therefore, no life. Nor architecture. Recognizing a place and the process of adapting ourselves to it affords the architect the ability to provide it with life. It gives us the opportunity to bring matter to life through a correct interpretation of light.
The Exhibition
Place. The gallery is imagined as an empty and neutral place, an abstract place that yearns to be modified and constantly reinvented. But this interpretation falls apart because of the unique and strong presence before the void of the two steel columns that dominate the centre of the room. The exhibition can occupy the heart of the white cube and attain, through the arrangement of the objects, the absorption of the columns as two more objects within the space. The weightlessness of the white cube can be attained by concentrating most of the exhibition material in it centre, so that it becomes the nucleus and the support for the space. This will allow the wrapping to remain floating around it-
Method. The exhibition’s system arises because of the need to blend the two columns with the other objects and to transform the white cube into a neutral space again. The formalization of the system is obtained with a mesh that organizes the space and offers each element a place to be seen in. This mesh is orientated North-South with respect to the city of Berlin. Figuratively, the aim is to express the necessity of the architectural work to be recognized in a physical space, an origin and a context.
Limit. When the exhibition has ended, it becomes a whole. The group of exhibition objects defines a perfectly recognizable place that, as both matter and the centre of the room, leaves a void, a space of light and movement around it.
The nucleus is defined with a mesh of 12 models, each built with just one of six material: glass, steel, wood, stone, ceramic and concrete. Thus, there are two models for each material.
The perimeter is defined by the void between the mesh of models and the enclosure of the room. It is delimited – with light- by the projection at each corner of the exhibition of the concepts that give meaning to the matter: place, light and space.
Inhabit. In this exhibition there is one nucleus, a heart, matter inhabited through light. The perimeter ring generates a route that the visitor experiences physically –around it, in circles – and visually –across it, diagonally. The goal is that the exhibition itself is inhabited and understood as any work of architecture: a still and silent nucleus –matter, the architectural object- and a space –a void that, through light waits to be experienced, set into movement: to be inhabited.
