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Symbolic Public Form & the Library Art Gallery of Ontario |
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BOX OF CHANGES | EISENMAN ARCHITECTS Jan. 2004 - Mar. 2004 Invited Competition | Guangzhou, China Museums are one of the primary cultural icons of the city. As such, they embody ideas not only about history, art, or nature, but also about place. A great museum develops from ideas about its place. The proposal for Guangdong Museum (New) is “The Box of Changes.” It evolves from two ideas about place: place as real artifact – the site – and place as a cultural idea – the I Ching. Successful museums are about circulation; about the dynamic movement of people through spaces. The diagram for our museum’s circulation was developed through our investigation of the I Ching. The classic key for identifying the I Ching hexagrams is a grid of 64 squares that pairs the upper and lower trigrams as hexagrams. A second, more recent interpretation of the hexagrams, known as the Eight Palaces, organizes the 64-square grid into eight groups of eight hexagrams, each of which begins with a twin trigram. We mapped the logical sequence of the Eight Palaces onto the classic 64-square grid. This process articulated eight circulation routes through the museum, routes generated by the logic of combining the two interpretations of hexagrams. For example, the contemporary hexagrams begin with Qian. This is square number one in the classic grid. The second contemporary hexagram, in which only one line changes, is Qian over Xun, or number 44. Hence the first route proscribed by mapping one interpretation of the hexagrams onto the other is a move from square one to square 44. The third hexagram moves from 44 to 33, which doubles back on the grid. This doubling back dictates that a ramp must begin to rise to the next level. And so forth. Once the eight routes were inscribed on the grid, we determined the order in which they should operate in the museum by referring to a third diagram, “Sequence of Later Heaven, or Inner-World Arrangement.” To begin at the beginning, that is, at the beginning of a seasonal year, we started with the double Gen hexagram, and rotated clockwise following this logic to organize a route through the museum that is not just circulation but is a route informed by a culture, its people, and their traditions. Through this process, we identified four real routes and four virtual paths that ascend and descend in the space. The real routes connect four floors of exhibition and support spaces, and ultimately lead to a roof garden, a park within the park. The virtual paths are not navigable but are carved into the floor plates as traces of the paths that cannot be traveled. Text: Cynthia Davidson |
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