Cor, Cordis

Color, Cordis is the transformation of the water tower situated in the lateral façade of one of the SESC Belenzinho buildings into an organ/motor of a simulated extra-corporal circulation system, a metaphor of the building activation.

Project

The invention and planning of Color, Cordis is based on a constructed visuality, but non-separable from the specificities of the place where the water tower is situated. Therefore, the first instruments had been the photographic recording and the innumerable measurements of the façade, to study the diverse possibilities of the imagined visuality. From them originated some drawings and photographic assemblies that, in turn, informed the elaboration of a digital model capable to simulate, in scale, operations to be later reproduced in real space.

The implied operations

Some of these operations will be transformations of existing elements in the place such as the proper water tower structure and all the tubes and pipes system that cross it. Others, of graphical nature, to be actually constructed, are the result of a perspectivated and distorted projection of the water tower on the façade and _ as a mix of shadow and fluid _ will penetrate through the windows of one of the floors of the old plant, spreading on floor and walls

The water tower:

Originally connected to the industrial building through a network of tubing, the water tower, now deactivated and looking abandoned, will cleaned (with water spurt) so that the new aseptic appearance can differ from the industrial building façade current state of deterioration.

The base:

To better function as detached reason that unchains the circulatory "event", the water tower sustentation pillars will act as edges for the construction of a closed cube, like a sculpture giving prominence to the superposed object. The particularity of this base plans is that they must section and include all the existing hardware in the place, some there by chance, when they intersect the constructed cube. The base external measures are given by the water tower sustentation pillars distance and height.

The tubing:

The complex mesh of different tubes and pipes arriving at the water tower space, sometimes penetrating in it and also in the façade, allows a direct visual analogy with a pattern of veins, arteries and valves within the body. The suggestion of circulation inside of this tubing, “increasing” as it approaches the bombardment place, is essential to the apprehension of the water tower extirpated heart metamorphosis, outside the building body. To emphasize this relation, all the metallic tubes (as well as the hardware intersected by cube/base) will be painted with dark red glossy enamel, following precise indication of shade and tonality.

The shaded silhouette:

The shaded projection, starting from the soil and expanding vertically through the façade, was digitally elaborated as a dark and perspectivated silhouette, generated by the water tower shadow. The graphical solution, however, comes from a double projection feature: in first place, of the water tower on some inclined plan, imaginary, producing a distorted shade, with visuality close to those projected in the floor by a vertical object. Secondly the projection of this same distorted shadow on the building, as if it was the very object inserted between the light source and the building, producing a new distortion on the façade.

In the first case the building is suppressed, as support to the projection: it only accounts the object and the plan. In the second, the water tower itself is the suppressed element: it only accounts the shade and the building. The double projection feature turns the Color, Cordis silhouette in a shadow of a shadow, as an anamorphose, in increasing artificialization in relation to its origin. Also it important here to conceptually coincide the imaginary inclined plan that would cross the building (support of the first shade projection) with the section (also imaginary) to be made in the same floor in which interior will be bounced and "spilled" the water tower perspectivated projection.

In the building façade:

The form of the digitally produced shaded silhouette will be mapped to transpose its contour on the façade and it can be extended (in paper) until the real size, to help in the production of masks to be affixed on the existing concrete, windows and glasses. The execution will be made in the quartz covering of dark tonality, following an indicated color (red or blue).

In the building interior:

In the third floor, in the interior area that intersects with the windows (currently closed with bricks) the adhered projection to the façade must coincide with another identical one, caused by the hypothesis of two matched space situations: in one side, that vertical façade ruptures at a certain height and, in the other, that through this opening in the space "passes" a reflection, in 90 degrees ("to fall" in the horizontal plan), of the shadow upper part that would be previously only on the façade. To this notion be effective, the projection on glasses must coincide accurately inside and outside the building – through a simple overlapping of the covering. Later, the interior silhouette will go down through the internal windows railing towards the soil, and from there it will enlarge inside the room, where it will reproduce, with another pattern, the upper part of the water tower shade _ now in "leaking" inside the building. The quartz covering can be applied with the aid of masks made according a digital pattern, in the required size and color similar to the projection of shade carried through externally.

In the water tower base:

A simple covering executed in quartz, of similar coloration to the water tower one - after being cleaned - will confer an adequate totality to the object, the central reason of Color, Cordis. The quartz support is the cubical construction made in plates of compensated wooden, such as related previously.

Regina Silveira