Home
Joy Natapa Sriyuksiri
Diploma 3
The project sees the immediate site context as a build-up of fossils of buildings; namely the 11th-century Romanesque church that was partially demolished during the building of Beauvais Cathedral and the 14th-century museum that was the bishop’s palace. These, which would have been demolished during the completion of the nave, have become a reminder of the process that got abandoned.By the cathedral being incomplete, it partially loses its monumentality. The nave is the ghost, which has never existed but at the same time the church depends partly upon its imagination to suggest its full value. Concrete is used in this instance as the material quality for both its liquid and solid form and is cast in situ as a ritual to quantify this mass.The existing buildings are preserved within the new building, echoing fossils within sedimentary rock, notably limestone, with which Beauvais Cathedral was built. The concrete-cast layers are poured in relation to the Cathedral's visual configuration. This model explores the possibility of using universal formwork for this large-scale project. The plywood model consisting of generic size shuttering panels of 1.25 x 2.5 m connected to bespoke pieces to accomodate for the museum within the mass.The internal volumes of the secular completion function as public spaces that surround the nave. These spaces are the bi-products of the derived mass. The mass that sits above the museum towers is a brightly lit space that cantilevers from the main mass. The lightweight structure pose no threat to the fragile 14th-century building as the extremely thin walls do not bear any weight.The monolithic block of the secular nave is juxtaposed against the filligree of the sacred cathedral.