Perceptual Choreography : If we take the existing St. Peter's Square to be an optical device of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, we can say that it once gave a new emotional role to the viewer - constructing and aligning for him the most-perfect overwhelming view of the great majestic Basilica. However, this project does not believe that "perspective" is still a static renaissance construction: our perception of space is much richer than the simple one-point perspective. Drawing also from the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and the theories of Henri Bergson, we understand "space" to be a moving continuum, rather than something to be viewed from a fixed point, and secondly, we understand "viewing" to be the perception of all surrounding space, rather than of that which is directly in front of us. The project proposes new optical mechanisms and new ways of representing our perception, as a way of designing. I attempt to show not only how our perception of space is relative to the speed at which we walk through it, but also vice versa - how different levels of interiority and exteriority (enclosure and openness) of a space, intuitively define their own walking speeds for visitors (e.g. one would walk much faster in a large street than in a small indoor room)...
The project deconstructs and mis-reads St Peter's square as it was not intended - as a moving space rather than a static one - fragmenting it into a sequence of "frames" along three walking paths towards the Basilica. Working in a curvilinear 6-point perspective, each frame addresses not what is in front of the viewer, but how he is surrounded from right and left. Choreographing an individual procession along each path, the project merges the topography (ground) and typology (colonnade) into a single perceptual language of surrounding space, deforming and manipulating both to create a space which meanders and jumps between fast areas and slow areas, between exteriority and interiority, in this way creating a space in which no single view is as important as the whole choreographed journey of perception through it.
