Lina Ghotmeh reveals a constructing that makes her smile

In fact, it isn’t actually about what makes me smile. It’s concerning the quiet emotion revealed if you enter an area that brings serenity: a way of radiance, stillness and presence. It’s not pleasure or laughter, however a deep, inward smile that emerges once we, as people, encounter nice magnificence.

Lina Ghotmeh on Luis Barragán’s Capuchin Convent Chapel, and extra

Many locations have had this impact on me. I recall visiting Luis Barragán’s Capuchin Convent Chapel in Mexico. Coming into the chapel is a profoundly stunning expertise. Mild gently fills the area and, as a result of pictures shouldn’t be permitted, you’re momentarily disconnected from expertise and from the fixed choreography of individuals taking footage. You go by means of a smaller area after which emerge into a bigger quantity, struck by the colored mild that filters by means of the stained glass home windows.

What’s most placing is how discreetly the constructing is tucked into the city material. It doesn’t announce itself. It feels much less like a monument and extra like a house for prayer.

An identical sense of awe lives within the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki. An unassuming rock outcrop opens all of a sudden right into a carved cavern topped with a dome resting on uncovered bedrock. One second, you’re surrounded by town; the subsequent, you are feeling as if you’ve entered the center of the earth. The copper-clad ceiling of the suspended dome and the comfortable glow of candlelight create a singular ambiance.

Álvaro Siza’s Boa Nova Tea Home in Portugal presents a comparable expertise: perched amongst rocks on the fringe of the ocean, it unfolds by means of motion, revealing panorama and horizon in a gradual, deliberate sequence.

What strikes me most shouldn’t be solely the immersive high quality of those areas, however their potential to hearken to their environment and reveal their magnificence. The structure virtually disappears, changing into a tool that frames panorama and choreographs expertise. There’s something inherently cinematic in such locations, as in Tadao Ando’s Chichu Artwork Museum in Naoshima, the place the constructing is excavated from inside a hill, dissolving the boundary between nature and structure.

The human expertise is all the time on the centre of my very own work. I consider buildings by means of proportion, motion and the best way a physique travels by means of area, as one thing that lightly holds folks, permitting them to really feel relaxed, current and alive. Structure, for me, is each a rare second and a quiet a part of on a regular basis life.

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