CENT Pavilion, Chicago

About

This slender and stable figure is meant to convey a sense of silent and convoluted simplicity. It is self-centered, self-regulated and self-located as an opaque monolith without any scale, direction or hierarchy, as a podium for an invisible statue. Its construction has a single structural logic. It is unwisely rational since the same corner detail is repeated all over and the same diagonal bracing underpins every center. But the handcrafted elements should imply delight over thought. In the end, this is a device that, in its own fiction, collects roughly everything: from Hockney’s inverted perspectives, Morandi’s natura morta or Guarini’s telescopic domes to those anonymous bell towers, water towers, lighthouses, silos, chimneys or even the inaccessible purgatory before an ambitious prototype for the next city high-rise.

Sources

• Arquitectura Viva