2008 copyright by .horhizon
.Voided Veilism
Confessional lobby, the virtual void in Pilgrimage Hotel, Rome
Author: Kenny Kinugasa Tsui
This project explores the mysterious qualities of emptiness in virtual space by realizing the potential grey zones of flipping positive and negative particles-generated surfaces in the computer, as an invisible dimension beyond its dualistic black and white definition of mass and void.
Sited in The Basilica of St’ Clemente, an unused church in Rome and an archaeological site of mystic edifices, evidence suggests a blissful mosaic depiction of the Bible myth, The Holy Tree of Life, that once sanctified the underground spaces. The symbolical foliage has been interpreted as a ‘veil’, a divine spark that generates a projective construction system of seeded particles. The surfaces of veils formed by particles continue to project, duplicate, repeat, and explode into layers of interstitial boundaries. The projective system locates nodes intrinsic with the intuitive qualities of simultaneous expansions and compressions. The centers of each node are in fact, empty spaces, voided with secret confessional uses. Due to the exuberate intensities of layering, the voids thus acquire their own corporeal bodies. The forces generated by the morphology of veil surfaces intuitively guide the pilgrims to finding the concealed confessional altars and communal spaces.
The pre-establishment of the veil’s projective properties has been studied through a series of partially constructed Rapid-prototype models. A set of photographic analysis involving the use of mirrors was used to simulate virtual images of the voids, thus the geometries were successfully cast into a corporeal virtuosity. The illusion of the void is hence created by the superfluity of excessive veils, configured by layers of interstitial surfaces. The proposed Pilgrimage hotel reinvigorates the original basilicas by acting as a vertical intervention into the historical archaeological strata, of which the veils intertwine the old and the new voids for confessional activities.