Exquisite Corpse Vaults
An architectural project in central Australia with Indigenous Elders to propose a huge stone public space - the conclusion for this hot sunny location was a giant covered piazza made as much as possible from the only local material viable stone.
This decision to build with stone led to the problem of the vault: and to style. Rather than historicist references, or engineer’s formal ideals, Weir’s proposal was for a surrealist method of stylistic abnegation, and authorial abdication, (notwithstanding that it may perhaps be systematised back to demand avoidance) and adapt the surrealist Exquisite Corpse design process. Many different iterations of the means of separating designers over days of work were trialled, ending with the following precisely controlled scenario:
The curved vaults are separated.into parts: and designers assigned a specifically defined part of the vault. In the white vaults shown in the images, 12 designers worked in isolation on the design and fabrication of their area: a column, a spandrel, or roof panel..
Three productively antagonistic criteria were given to each designer. First, make a unique, strong and expressive form in your areas. Second, make the resulting design of the whole vault show a seamless whole, so that the boundaries between neighbours is either invisible or somehow beautiful and fascinating. Third, you must alter the shape of your boundary. You can communicate with your neighbours using only a single surface, or a single joining block, passed back and forth.
Digital images, physical models, pencil drawings, 2016-20.
Some of this has been distributed here:
Weir, S., Wozniak-O'Connor, D., Watt, R., Reinhardt, D., Fernando, S., Dibbs, J. (2018) "Design and Fabrication of a Ruled Surface Vault with the Exquisite Corpse" Nexus Network Journal, 20(3), 723-740.
Weir, S., Egorova, E., Wozniak-O’Connor, D., Watt, R., Masuda, R. (2019) “Exquisite Corpse Stereotomy”
Sydney Design Festival, Sydney, NSW.
