Archinect
michael jantzen

michael jantzen

Santa Fe, NM, US

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The Positive/Negative House Pavilion

The Positive/Negative House Pavilion

            The Positive/Negative House Pavilion is a steel public art sculpture. Even though the outside and inside dimensions of the two houses are the same, the spatial experience is very different and the two together form an unexpected and exciting pavilion, functioning perfectly as a public gathering place.

             The structure consists of two large symbolic house shaped forms mounted onto a large concrete base. One called the positive house, and the other called the negative house. The positive house has nine opening cut through the floor, walls and roof. The negative material cut from those openings of different shapes and sizes were reassembled along side of the positive portion of the pavilion in exactly the same relative position from where they were extracted from the positive house.

            The design of the pavilion allows visitors to experience the positive and negative aspects of a specific kind of space. As an example, when visitors are inside or outside of the positive house, they can only look and/or move through the negative openings in the floor, walls, or roof. When they are inside or outside of the negative house, they can only look and/or move through the positive opening. Each of these is a very different kind of experience. The visitors also have the option of interacting with the pavilion in other ways such as sitting and/or lying on the floor portions of the positive and negative houses. This again leads them into a different kind of spatial interactivity because what is raised up from the ground plan in one house is lowered in the other.

 
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Status: Unbuilt