London Design Festival | Pawson's Perspectives - New York Times (blog)
The emphasis at the London Design Festival — as at any contemporary design exhibition — is on the new new new. But a number of L.D.F. installations explore the idea of seeing the old in a different way, including those at the Victoria & Albert Museum (the subject of my next post) and — most spectacularly — the collaboration between the London architect John Pawson and Swarovski Crystal Palace at St. Paul's Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece, which is celebrating its 300th anniversary this year. "Perspectives" opens to the public today, and remains open until mid-January 2012.
Rather than work with the well-known parts of the building — the west elevation, the nave or the dome — Pawson chose the Geometric Staircase in the cathedral's 75.5-foot-tall southwest tower, which leads to the dean's library, and which has never been open to the public. Pawson called the helical staircase "extraordinary" for its self-supporting structure. "If you took one step out," he said, "the whole thing would collapse."
Pawson's moves here are deceptively simple. He put a concave meniscus lens, nearly 16 inches across and made by Swarovski, atop the highly polished surface of a custom-designed, stainless steel hemisphere at the bottom of the stairwell, and a convex mirror at the top. When you look into the lens, you see the underside of the staircase as Pawson himself sees it: a pure spiral, without the visual distractions of windows and balustrades. (The convex mirror offers a bird's-eye view of the staircase.) "The thought was to get people to see the staircase," he said. "I wanted people to see Wren's work, not mine."
But you can't help admiring the elegance and ingenuity of Pawson's solution, which was influenced by his collaboration with Swarovski. The minimalist master recalled that Nadja Swarvoski, who is responsible for the ongoing, innovative Crystal Palace program (which includes projects by an A-list roster of designers) had always wanted to work with him, but that "as you can imagine, the crystals, while very successful, are not really my thing." But Pawson also knew that Swarovski was a major manufacturer of lenses, and the idea of a lens meshed perfectly with Wren's original intention that the stair tower should also function as a scientific instrument.
Pawson, who is also at work on high-profile projects like the new home of the Design Museum in London (the museum mounted a retrospective of his work a year ago) and a hotel in Israel for the developer and art collector Aby Rosen, clearly relished the opportunity to work with what he called "a magical space." In spite of his resolve not to upstage that space, he admits that his design is "slightly 'Harry Potter'-ish. It looks like you could disappear through it."
20 Sep, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNG6eiyfC3rhHDcfDAwNX2edfu2UAw&url=http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/london-design-festival-pawsons-perspectives/
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