Room of One’s Own Memory

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Temporary Pavilion and Workshop

Location:
Călărași, Romania

Date:
2022

In collaboration with:
William Chew

Role:
Tutor

Part of:
European Architecture Students Assembly

Images by:
William Chew

Thus a concrete programme was designed, which can be stated succinctly as follows:

For ten years, from 1925 to 1935, Bartlebooth would acquire the art of painting
watercolours.

For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate
of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical format (royal,
65 cm × 50 cm) depicting seaports. When each was done, he would dispatch it to a
specialist craftsman (Gaspard Winckler), who would glue it to a thin wooden backing
board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.

For twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, on his return to France, would
reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once again, of one puzzle a fortnight.
As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be
removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted — twenty
years before — and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and
unmarked sheet of Whatman paper.

Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period
of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.

Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual (1978)

If the facades of a city were to be abstracted into an interior, would the room remind us of the city at all? Through the workshop, participants studied the facades of the city of Călărași, characterised for their flat surfaces and graphic motives, and abstracted them to create a small interior.

The resulting construction was a temporary pavilion made of fabric and suspended from scaffolding. Square in plan and tall in section, it referenced the profile of the small basilicas in Eastern Romania. The room; intimate in scale but large enough to host a small crowd; was used as a space for performances, public readings and discussions.

‘Thus no trace would remain of the operation’
In order to minimise waste, the pavilion was designed with demountability in mind: Each participant took home a piece of the walls; the ropes, uncut, were reused in a subsequent workshop.

Heidi Bucher, Hautraum (1987)

Heidi Bucher, Flying Room Skin (1987)

Aldo Rossi, Skeleton of Teatro del Mondo (1980)

Refurbishment of Cologne Cathedral (2022)

A small room: for sharing, for reading, for viewing out from

Process images. Making 1:1 tracings of facades in Călărași