The Poetics of Access Apparatuses in Contemporary Lyric Exhibition Spaces

Abstract

Cultural architecture of exhibition spaces is a complex program, which oftentimes relies on dualities and contrasts that transcend the visual, material or functional experience, thus, sometimes imperceptibly creating a dialogue between the palpable and the intangible. As a fundamental architectural theme, that, in spite of extensive research, cannot be mathematically quantified, but only holistically experienced through an accumulation of senses, feeling, thought, imagination, personal memory and identity, the intangible may be regarded as an additional dimension only experienced in profoundly designed spaces that shelter an intrinsic emotion of architecture. These spaces of cultural, historical, social representation and remembrance succeed in “speaking” without using any “words”, or even if they do, they come to rather represent the space between the “words”… The intangible aspect of representation spaces can only be analysed in regard with the human factor, as it is the one that, both through the process of creation and through the one of experimentation, doubled by the measure of time, can generate this additional dimension and lyric depth, transforming space into experience, mere visual assimilation into transcendental synaesthesia. The main feature of these spaces based on collective memory, emotions and reflexion beyond their tangible features is thus, given by their innate spatial and temporal identity. But when does this transformation from the epic to the lyric genre take place in architecture? Having this query in mind, we aim to study when and how this poetic dimension occurs, as cultural exhibition spaces are actual, physical buildings, part of tangible cities. Therefore, focusing on the boundary between the exterior and the interior of contemporary cultural spaces of exhibition, we intend to analyse and categorize types of access apparatus as part of welcoming gates into spaces with different types of immaterial depth and atmosphere. Generated through addition, subtraction, volume reinterpretation, contrast, dialogue, geometrical transformation or story-telling successive approach, accesses are the first tools the architect can use in order to design an experience. Being previously involved in collectives that designed innovative remembrance or exhibition spaces, our research will be based on both existing models and personally designed ones, as well as on both the experience of the user and the one of the architect, therefore, decoding the relationship between practice, empirical design and experiential environmental poetry. Focusing on the gateway between the pragmatic exterior and the interior intrinsic spatial consciousness, an expression of their dialogue will be revealed.