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Radu Macovei
First Year
Bloomsbury Festival Installation ProposalCrossing a boundary is a dramatic moment embodied in its inherent feature of change of environment. The street connecting Neal’s Yard to Shorts Gardens is such a boundary. This transitional area is enhanced by the coexisting layers of the street: the commercial, the spiritual and the change in skyline.The street filters passers-by from the main traffic artery into the traffic-free Neal’s Yard. In this transition, the passer-by is also set in an ever-more intense shadow until finally he reaches the yard, where the skyline opens up again.The street itself and its condition to be a boundary is only understood in the context of the larger neighbourhood and its connectivity. The axo view shows how the street filters the surrounding circulation, permitting people and not cars to reach Neal’s Yard.The cover of a magazine which seeks to understand how figurative monuments function in relation to the architecture around them.This series of models explores the rite of passage from one state of governance to another in the case of Gadafi's Libya and Niyazov's Turkmenistan.This design-based project is rooted in an initial research which identified the subjugation of architecture to the pedestal, the frame and the referential symbol as means to glorify the figurative sculpture in the human Figure as Power. The Figure as Desire is another manifestation of the figure in society whereby the human figure becomes desirable through carefully studied poses and curated lives in new mediums such as facebook. With the aim of revealing and exploring the absurdity of the Figure as Desire (where the human figure becomes an object) I translate techniques used by facebook in three architectural façades (e.g. activated and deactivated states of each façade).The façades are treated as independent objects on three floor levels, framed below and above by the already existing basement and attic respectively.The façade defines the shapes of the volumes. The volumes pierce the building to have the figure being exhibited against the neutral background of the sky. The building’s interior is redefined to accommodate the human body to exhibit itself.More façades activate and figures start appearing in them. When observing the sky above has become part of the façade, always contrasting the figure exhibited.