The Church Of Perpetual Experimentation

"The Church of Perpetual Experimentation" was my final year project in Diploma 9 under Natasha Sandmeier and Monia DeMarchi, and involved the design of a sprawling new Church in the southern Roman suburb of EUR, set within the fictive context of a new pontificate that is devoted to the massive restucturing and expansion of the church, its liturgies and its architecture. The site in EUR is set aside by the new pope as a field of experimentation where the doctrinal and liturgical innovations being developed over the Tiber in the Vatican are put immediately to test and trial with the practising -and non-practising- public. The project was developed in many directions at the same time, and while having a strong technical basis which was pulled right through to 1:1 fragments being manufactured, it was also surrounded by an elaborate mythology which was explored through alot of writings (relating to the inventions of the theologians and the presentation of their ideas in a sort of Council of Trent set of guidelines, as well as the chains of consequences and events surrounding the whole endeavour), and many drawings that contained silent spatial narratives. The final presentation was through the film below which pulled everything together into a short explanation. The original version was alot more story-based, but I remade it with a stronger emphasis on formal issues.

This is the intr0duction to the Film:


This is the film which presents in a compressed form the story of the whole project:


This is the Pope's Inaugural Speech that initiated the experiment:

When waking with the sun and then ploughing fields or tending to sheep or sweating in the smithy all day until the sun set was the breadth of man’s horizon;
When the written word was a mystical cypher of which man knew nothing;
When Nature was vast, terrifying, dangerous and inexplicable;
When death wasn’t only an idea -something one knew would happen one day- but was a smell to be avoided in the streets;
When the body was so often a burden of pain to be suffered and from which there was no respite;
When life was such a narrow path of tedium peppered with horror and misery, the Church proclaimed the transcendence of every individual beyond his sores and abscesses; the Church placed man’s life and his death within an inimitable and beautiful plan of salvation beyond the stink of corpses; the Church extracted man from his narrow and incessant toil to celebrate creation and existence, which, rather than being cursed for its hardship, was glorified and illuminated in ceremony and stone. Man was overwhelmed by the intoxicating mixture of liturgy, icon, statue and story; he was convinced through the mysteries of the Church and their representations that life indeed did have meaning, that indeed there was something magical and profound about existence, about life, and also about pain and suffering.
But now that the rising of the sun has little significance, man wakes as he pleases, where he pleases, and knows that during the coming day his horizons may extend to embrace the globe;
Now that knowledge clings to each man as thickly as an odour, as thickly as a smell that emanates from the autopsy table on which lies the dissected, analysed, categorised and preserved remnants of Nature’s mysteries;
Now that death and pain have been marginalised to the periphery of vision, to specially quarantined buildings;
Now that the body is so often a collection of parts to be perfected or changed at will;
Now that magic and representation have haemorrhaged into every corner of the Real, and stand for nothing but distraction;
Now that life is such a vast landscape of endless choice peppered with information, opportunity and answers, the Church must proclaim the transcendence of every individual beyond the boredom of perfection; the Church must place man’s boundless freedom and his unlimited emptiness back within a plan of salvation beyond the cadaver of mystery. The Church must rediscover and reclaim the magic of representation and re-inject it with an amazement of existence. The Church must plunge itself into the contemporary world to find the raw material, the techniques with which it can once again convince man that indeed life does have meaning, that indeed there is something magical and profound about existence: that man’s great plague -the blight of meaninglessness- is no different today than it was when pain and suffering ruled, only now it is impossible to seduce man into belief with only ceremony and stone.
A lot more is needed, man is waiting, and to that effect, on the eve of my election I am announcing the convention of the Third Vatican Council. The Grand Conciglio will no doubt continue to examine our faith in great depth for many years to come, and beyond my time in the pontificate. Taking this into consideration I will be focusing my efforts on the formation of a sub-council which will endeavour to re-engage the laity through a direct, and possibly radical reconstruction of our tangible presence in their lives. In order that the ideas and decisions of this sub-council do not remain as exciting intention imprisoned on paper, in order that from the first steps of this Grand Council we will lead by concrete example, in order that the laity may engage with us while we are proceeding, in order for these things to happen I have set aside a parcel of land in this very city, the heart of our faith, so that it may become the physical register of our will to change.
I hereby convene the Third Vatican Council, convene and chair the First Committee for the Architecture of Ecclesiastical Engagement, and I hereby initiate the founding of the Church of Perpetual Experimentation.

An image of an interior area in the Church after many years of Experimentation:


The vaults under construction with a performance of Spectacular Mass happening below:


The main chapters of the Committee's publication as a monument:


A drawing explaining the sequence of events and developments in the life of the Church (including a controversial visit by Giorgia):




The Technical plate of the church's vaults:


Three sections running through the site:








The plan, cut at several levels, and sometimes looking up, sometimes down:






A drawing of the Spectacular Staircases:


Interior views of a Recorporation Room and Corridor, both in the subterranean realm of the Recorpisteries:


















A piece of one of the Mausochapeleum towers:






A model of the Altar-floats that move around the Spectacular Staircases celebrating Mass:






One of the Climbing-Frame chandeliers, and Building-Block columns in the Multi-Nave area:










These are some of the models through which I developed the structural integrity of the vaulting system of the church and aligned their decorative schemes (tiling and profile carving) with that logic:
























Two voussoirs were taken from one of the vaults and built out of Travertine in collaboration with Porcelli-Marmi in Pietrasanta, Tuscany:










The landscape of the Spectacular Staircases that run through the church were made by Cordek with a huge milling machine into an 8metre long foam sculpture which was shipped to the AA in London as the base for our unit's end of year exhibition:






Everyone painting the foam in Bedford Square:







The final crazy exhibition. We called the landscape the "Altar", there was a space underneath it called the "crypt" and the wall of images was the "Iconostasis". For better images see the AADIP9 blog .

Altar, Crypt and Exhibition headers:






The exhibition:




In October there was the AAHonours exhibition and this was my display (with my mother watching the movie, and thats me talking to Jake Choi in the second pic):

Stop-Start Animations With Objects

These two clips and the clip of me in the mirror are actually a part of an 8minute long film which cannot be uploaded to youtube because it has copyrighted music on it (and the film doesnt work at all w/out the soundtrack)... oh well!

The first


And the second:

In The Mirror In The Morning

an extract from the film that the rotation animation above were taken from.

One Way To Look At Capri

This is the short film I made as a response to a week and a half visit to the island of Capri in the bay of naples. I felt that its strength as a circumscribed unit was immense. The conveyance of its many particularly singular historic moments, geographical delights, architectural relics and present comfortable, but ever allusive atmosphere was constant and thorough; whether through the numerous architectural details or the incessant spiel of the locals, Capri expressed itself constantly and clearly as a discernable atmosphere, historical ecology, and object...

This had all culminated in a two day search (and then a day filming, of which footage I only used about 10seconds!) for the place from where all the hotels and holiday homes bought their fake godesses, Marys, Tiberiuses, doric and ionic columns. It was a large, intriguing place on the road from Anacapri to the lighthouse on the eastern end of the island, and just packed full of all the items which the island itself, by 2007, was totally packed full of -and builders were busily loading more and more of the stuff on the backs of their little specially altered piaggio-cum-trucks, to take away and fill the tiny island even more.

This film was incorporated into Objectification later on.

a diagram:

Objectification: A Parable of Posession

This is the tale of a man, his life's only journey, his only passionate love, and the solitude at its end...

The Film in Two Parts:



A Summary/Explanation:


Some images of the work on show at the moment in the Corridor Gallery, Hackney Road (you can see the film at the top of the stairs on the tv). I would like to say a big thank you to Amita, Vicky, Emma and Christoph for inviting me to show there:









A diagram of the general plot structure:


and a note on the title:



The sculptures (as with most work on the blog) are available in a limited series. Please contact me if you are interested in purchasing one.

Two Men and their Monuments

These are two short stories taken from a film about different ways to map and experience a city, the film is half french and half english, and I seem to have lost the version with the subtitles so Im just going to post the two in English which are about two men who are in different ways infatuated with different monuments in their city. Monuments of the kind that are hosts to daily visits by hundreds of busloads of tourists going on those mad whistlestop tours of Europe.

One Way To Look At An Empty Shop (Film)

youtube description:
"Taking the moment in a scene in Godard's LeMepris when the camera pans around a statue of Zeus as a starting point, I imagined the director, prior to the film's conception, walking into a bric-a-brac shop with nobody in it and full of old statues and furniture, and beginning to form his ideas of the overall plot and characters in the film through the items scattered around him."

HandBin description:
This was the second film that I made, and its quite dear to me as it was around the making of it that I began to be fascinated by the presence of highly constructed artifacts, by the ability of objects, films, paintings, and buildings to acquire a life of their own more than, but relying on, and complementary to, their materiality. A life that is affirmed and vivified by the attention and contemplation of observers, but which cannot exist without, and relies entirely upon an efficacy which stems from the level of completeness bestowed upon the item by its creator, a form of conclusiveness which encloses the object in on itself as a contained unity of meaning that is entirely independent of its origin, of the artist. Like the unexplainable moment of liquefaction that is unique to every material, I imagine that there is a point for each artist, for each object that he makes when it reaches independence and sets sail on its own as something more than his or her creation, and something more than the material it is made up of, something that is so strongly of-itself that all future gazes, all future thoughts stemming from apprehending its forms, will, although necessarily each developing thoughts stemming from the observer's own experiences and mind, nonetheless catch a glimmer of the light which the object will give off like the radiation released over the course of its aesthetic half-life. The film imagines Jean-Luc Godard reaching the moment when the characters, plot, colours, scenes, and atmospheres of his film Le Mepris coalesce in his mind to start forming the image of the kind of completeness described above. This happens in a bric-a-brac shop full of pitiful and mundane objects, but things that nonetheless together act as a static reflection of what is forming in his mind, and aids and accompanies the events of intuition taking their own course in his head…

oh, and I starting looking at duration in regards to observing the object, so coming at it from both ends, the initila creative act and the later apprehension of the object in time by an observer... you can have a look at what I wrote on the second page with drawings and text below the movie.




and a couple of explanatory pages:

Chapters, Shapes and Synapses

Images from two projects, the first (Mr A) involved the mapping out of the daily routine of a rather defeated man, and then inverting it throught the construction of a dream world space in which the architecture serves to take him on a roller coaster ride that unravels the absurd hermeticism of his environment. The next project (the Bs) follows the relationship of a newly married couple and their relationship with their new house, and architect over twenty years. They re-build their terrace house bit by bit, as money becomes available over the years, and develop certain excentricities in their habits which partially come from the eccentricities in their architecture, and partially feed into the next architectural phase making it even odder, and so on until they end up with a house so idiosyncratic it is impossible to sell.