Selenite Dreams Installation

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud

PROJECT EXECUTION
Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger, Laëtitia Chauveau, Malak Abdelhady

CONSTRUCTION SUPERVISION
Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide

PUBLICATION DRAWINGS
Malak Abdelhady, Rui Da Silva

CONCEPT DESIGN
Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger

PHOTOGRAPHS
Dylan Perrenoud

AREA
24 M²

YEAR
2022

LOCATION
Le Chenit, Switzerland

CATEGORY
Installation, Lighting, Detail

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud

Plaster, the extracted form of gypsum, essentially composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate, appears as a good figuration of the BUREAU’s general attitude towards architecture.

If we were to define ourselves as minor architects, following Jill Stoner’s book «Towards a minor architecture», working with what is considered a minor material seems quite d'à-propos.

It is one that has been utilized to prefigure and anticipate masterpieces in the numerous “galéries des plâtres” around the world, fabricating figurative positive molds of definite sculptures, forever “graved in stone”. The plaster seems more malleable, elastic, and fragile.

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud

It also possesses the ability to trigger mythological reveries as gypsum’s synonym is selenite, a mineral that has filled many wondrous stories.

La Cueva de los Cristales in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico, materializes the dreamy spheres of Selene, goddess of the moon.

The seemingly banal construction material hides many facets of a rich life, whether as a fundamental discrete companion of Rodin and so many others, as a crystal, or as a mental scape beyond the world and in mythological orbits.

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud

In yet another form, the material is used for bone fractures, soft tissue injuries, orthopedic diseases, and inflammatory processes, to bring peace and rest to wounded parts of the body.

In 1939, Salvador Dalí participated in the World of the Tomorrow, a world’s fair that featured the future, with prospective designs from SOM, Norman Bel Geddes, and other modernists and visionaries of the time.

Dalí provoked the streamlined futuristic foresight of those avant-garde actors with a surrealist tone and he made it so with a plaster-like architecture anticipating thus installation art, Gesamtkunstwerk works that would largely populate the 20th-century art world.

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud

His intervention, an oneiric pavilion, freely reenacts Botticelli’s painting of Venus and transforms it into a three-dimensional and total experience.

It constituted a minor major piece of architecture that found its way to New York with the advice of no other than William Morris, father of socialist utopias and wallpapers.

A much smaller scale and other rather trivial historical circumstances confront the modest plaster to a luxurious context designed by a recognized modernist corporate practice of our time: Bjarke Ingels Group.

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud

In an exhibition dedicated to the very presence of materials and their transformation, the art pieces of Nina Beier, Latifa Echakhch, Raphael Hefti, Olivier Laric, and Christodoulos Panayiotou (among others), are found in a cave condition that the viewer discovers by diving into a seemingly undefined white grotto.

To stimulate the experience, the existing space is totally transformed behind the plaster walls and vaults, bringing the visitor into close contact with the art pieces.

The usual white cube condition seems to have slightly melted as an echo of Dali’s delusive art, producing unclear edges in a spatial continuum or topological deformation.

Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud
Selenite Dreams Installation
© Dylan Perrenoud


Selenite Dreams Installation
Section
Selenite Dreams Installation
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Selenite Dreams Installation
Ground Floor Plan
Selenite Dreams Installation
Axonometrica