in Orbetello
A CELESTIAL EMPORIUM OF BENEVOLENT THINGS
Project by: Alexis Diaz and Bryce Edwards
“But no sooner have they been adumbrated than all these groupings dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is still too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity, creating groups then dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety.”
-Foucault, “The Order of Things”
PLAN. Site-wide alphabetization, superimposed upon a chaotic topography in plan--an abstract table to order an abandoned productive ground.
‘O’ SECTION. Cut through a single pavilion containing clocks, ogee arches, an olive tree, and pottery.
FAR VIEW. Represented from a south-facing vantage point. Objects which fall outside the 21-letter Italian alphabet occupy a liminal zone of exception (a big gravel pile). Each building straddles the division between two or more letters.
FAR VIEW (GIF). Objects not to scale.
NEAR VIEW A. Assembly within A pavilion. Only A (Italian) words allowed. Landscape and building are contiguous containers.
Work from Exercise 1. Exploration of tourism--in its full historical scope--as a productive ground. Itinerant objects accompany travelers, composing finite episodes of architecture.
Work from Exercise 2. Representing three qualities of tourism: itinerant things, agglomerating stuff, cascading subjectivities. A single object composed of three 3D-scans, each taken in a different location: an itinerant camera, which becomes the ground of agglomerated (alphabetical) objects. Saturnia Baths as a piecemeal assembly of images (pixel-by-invariant-pixel) into a single whole: a cascading subjectivity.