Togetherness / Togetherless is a spatial composition that explores the ways in which basic, fundamental elements of architecture can be used to create a temporary community. The neologistic title refers to the individual’s need for closeness and being together, and the simultaneous, paradoxical inability to ever fully achieve it.
The layers of history, context, and external references inscribed into the pavilion are greatly drawn from the Croatian City of Rijeka and its experience as the European Capital of Culture in 2020 when it served as an arena for spatial and artistic research and experimentation.
The team of authors of the pavilion were invited to collaborate by the Curator
Idis Turato as a natural succession to previous numerous collaborations within the DeltaLab – Center for Urban Transition, Architecture and Urbanism, flagships “Sweet & Salt” and “Dopolavoro” and the exhibition and book Fiume Fantastika all within the project Rijeka 2020.
The appearance of the pavilion is determined by three rudimentary, universal and timeless elements of architecture—the base, the column, and the roof—all materialized as an assemblage of elements using resources from Rijeka’s history, industrial past and mass production.
The city is regarded as a laboratory and archive of ready-made elements, some of which are then selected and displaced into an entirely novel context, thus given completely new meanings. The building elements of the pavilion, isolated from their original context and tailored for a new purpose, temporarily adopt new functions and multiple possible identities, resulting in unexpected relations among each other and in relation to the visitor. With new spatial meanings reinscribed into them, they acquire a new spatial role.
Thus, a concrete guard booth in the form of a hundred-year-old bunker serves as a load-bearing column and “a room for one.” It is a module for an individual, a sort of minimal spatial unit, giving the one visitor the feeling of complete isolation. It is the element that structurally connects the base and the roof, breaching the structure of the latter and towering over it.
Glass-reinforced polyester structure crafted in a specialized maritime-vessel workshop serves as a hip roof element—the cornerstone of the pavilion. It is set at a height that forces visitors to bend down to get under it and experience the interior of the pavilion. The roof’s low position also obviates the possibility of direct visual contact between people moving along the Arsenal corridor and those under the pavilion roof, producing new relations and collective spatial tensions between passers-by and visitors.
Various shipyard cutouts, originally part of a ship’s hull, form the structure of the base of the pavilion, a common ground. This ground element is positioned as a step up from the Arsenale area, defining the territory of our community. In addition, it serves as structural function of counterbalance to all the other elements, which are connected to it.
The fourth element is a green-screen look-alike wall and curtain that surrounds the pavilion. It instantly suggests an atmosphere of a film set, defining the pavilion as a performance stage on which images and relations are produced and manipulated.
The elements of the pavilion put together in their new context and surrounded by the green screen are placed onto the Arsenal corridor, hinting that the Biennale visitors find themselves more on a floodlit movie set amidst green wall surroundings. In this theatrical context, the whole spatial field of the pavilion becomes an accidental podium for the visitors to adopt temporary roles of members of an ad-hoc community formed and enabled by architectural elements.
The repurposing of elements from the city and their recontextualization through inscription of new meaning emphasizes the position of the authorial team of the myriad possibilities of resetting any given city whose built landscape contains decaying structures, abandoned spaces, areas, and zones — elements that need to be regarded and examined from a fresh perspective in order for them to have any future use or utility.
Such an approach to design, based on dislocation and redefinition, solidifies the method chosen in creating a new architectural order.
Digital footprint of the project is a specially designed Playground where visitors can assemble and create their own collages and architectural artefacts made out of cut-outs from elements found in Rijeka.
