138
EUROPA
From the building’s shell, the glass scales’ appearance can be deduced. With
its brilliance and due to its curve, the lantern’s façade will shine its thousands
of curved facets in the atrium, at any time of the day. Yet for lack of imagining
a polygon with a thousand sides (chiliagon) or ten-thousand sides (myriagon),
coiled up along the flanks of this giant body [“…
I am unable to imagine the thou-
sand sides of a chiliagon, as I can the three sides of a triangle, nor, as it were,
look at them as present with my mind’s eye”.
Descartes,
Méditations,
VI], the
mechanism of such a construction must be well envisioned. The way the pan-
els are fixed to the structure and the precision of their assembly on the lantern’s
curves, constitute one of these architectural details without which there is no
hope for any understanding of art’s technical actions or the effect they produce.
If the mounting of these glass trapezoids could be watched, the thin horizontal
bearing plates could be seen linked to the mullions of the primary structure and
the metallic fittings that adjust each part to the overall geometry, to its mechani-
cal tolerances, to the required continuity between adjoining panels. All of this
in order to ensure the beauty of the result. The powers of the animation of the
architecture are linked, as in the image industry but life-sized, to the virtues of
editing and to a technical action directed at our perception. Success depends on
the blending of an overall view and the logical reasoning by induction based on
the concatenation of details. The tension of construction operations will remain
in the sensation perceived by those who nevertheless will have seen nothing and
know nothing about the stage direction of the construction site.
The serigraphy of white strokes, applied on glass panels, confirms, and this time
in an immediately visible way, both the precision of the layout and the gradations
pursued for the sharpness of perception. The drawing and pattern of the layout
restrict the view from the atrium to the lantern’s internal galleries, more so than
it limits the view in the opposite direction, from the inside out. By doing so, the
variations of the motif match the curve of the volume and aesthetically enhance
the pattern of its vertical layout. The higher you look towards the convex centre,
the more transparency decreases. The interval between the serigraphy strips
decreases, their chevrons get wider on the central panels, the furthest from the
base and the top: denser texture in the middle, where the lantern widens; more
loose and dilated at the top and bottoms, where it is narrower.
Silk screen pattern of the lantern’s glass (elevation AA, see page 143), 2012.
GLASS ELLIPSES
