Odd Look

Odd Look

Aldeia da Mata has stood for nearly 7,000 years, maintaining a relationship with the landscape as a natural feature but also as a constructed artifact. It is both a structure of and out of time, ancient and contemporary. The proposal serves as a frame through which the continually changing culture of Alentejo, Portugal, and Europe is marked against the dolmen. If the world around Aldeia da Mata is changing, and the dolmen remains constant, the proposal is a space that mediates the two - outwardly looking to the dolmen, but also inwardly towards the shifting priorities, fashions, the zeitgeist of our times.

Odd Look traces the interior skin of the dolmen and maps it onto the external framing envelope of the programmed space. This inversion is a visitor’s first look at the building, an unconscious reading of Aldeia da Mata. The visitor views layers of landscape, program, and history through space, an ephemeral embedding of reflection, exhibition, environment, interaction, using perspectival enclosure to contract space and time. Odd Look uses perspective as a tool to draw the dolmen closer whilst maintaining its distance and power in the landscape. One navigates around and between minimal private enclosed programming; the negative space is a sequence punctuated by openings that frame a shifting composition of visitors, artifacts, local geomorphology, constantly redefining the meaning of the Neolithic orthostats in relation to the individual. Odd Look is an interstitial threshold structure that operates simultaneously as gate, wall, frame, and passage; a device that provokes reflection on one’s own role and position to the ancient, natural, local landscapes that Aldeia da Mata sits within.

Competition
ARKxSITE
Partners—Lukas Vajda, Meredith Yee
F2019