RIBA Goldfinger Scholar 2007

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With the support of the RIBA Goldfinger Scholarship Gergely pursued his interest of a highly speculative architecture at the Diploma School of the Architectural Association. His diploma project ‘The Construction of Neutrality’ is an attempt to colonize the space between representation and reality. It investigated an impossible complex of overlapping cultural and political territories, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem representing the ultimate site of conflict that questions the fundamentals of neutrality as a construction.

The proposal for the Temple Mount engages the site from two parallel directions drawing upon the Roman occupation of Jerusalem in 70 AD resulting in the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the erection of the Colosseum, and the peacekeeping efforts of the Clinton era climaxing in the Camp David Summit in 2000.

 

Relying on antiquity as a constant yet always reinvented context it uses digital forensics on Piranesi’s etching, to deconstruct the seminal example of the architecture of separation, the Roman Colosseum, questioning the relation of inside and outside.

Ex-President Clinton has previously proposed that a 1.5 metre deep underground neutral slab separate Muslim surface from Jewish underground. As a critique of the impossible simplicity of this, it is deconstructed using similar operations to that of the Colosseum; L I Magnus’ 1831 inversion formula, which in mathematics is used as an alternative space for solving unsolvable conundrums, is here used to generate inverted reflections of the site, allowing spatial liberties and convolutions for joint occupation impossible both within normal space and under the current, and historic, political constraints.

 

Instead of a static status quo this system creates a dynamic neutrality where neutrality is constructed through time. The strategy for the site proposes that the religious calendars are used to direct the action of a series of spheres of inversion over and under the temple mount: Clinton’s neutral layer is thus replaced by a complex topographic choreography, which delivers the convolutions of neutrality, over time to the whole site; a system that is to contain and curate a series of incompatible, subjective parallel readings of these shared histories. The simultaneous inversions create a surface that dynamically changes the relation between inside and outside and merges these categories, escaping the binary structure both present in Clinton’s proposal and the Colosseum.