The location
Luminous emotions
The composition
The structure
The process

PROJECT BRIEF

The location suggested for the intervention is a place, a square, an esplanade, an anthill where people squash up, cross each other, quit them, then find each other again. It is a node in the public transport system. By what it borders, by those who cross it, this place is communication on its own. The project presented here chooses to remind mankind that communication starts and ends on the public place, where one can speak to the other, can touch him, embrace, laugh or smile, or simply be excited together with him, vibrate side by side.

The project wants to reinforce the idea of an esplanade by giving it an additional quality: in so that it be a partially covered place, sublimated by means of natural light by day and artificial by night. By day: sun, by its changing position and intensity through the stained glass, produces sets of colours and intensity which are never identical. In lowering or raising the head, while standing still or in motion, it offers a dynamic set of diffusions, diffractions and projections of the sun through the colours of the stained glass. At night: a dynamic lighting at the top of four masts passes through the stained glass and produces on the ground, with intensifying contrasts, an infinite range of luminous scenographies. At the same time, an extremely powerful beam projected from the ground through the inner circle of the stained glass prolongs the latter in a true signal of coloured light, visible all over the city. The art of stained glass, more than a homage to the sublime work which it represents, proposes here a different dimension of it. From its origin to its golden age, the art of stained glass has principally magnified the religious architecture in the beginning of the millennium. In the beginning of the century, the Art Nouveau made it reappear formidably by introducing it into everybody's house. Here it becomes entire architecture and, on the public place, is offered to each one.

At any time of its history, the stained glass was carrier of a message. In our case its composition transposes into a real space one mathematical landscape of our era. To choose as principle of composition this space of Mendelbrot is at the same time:

• to testify to the mathematical revolution of this century: the discovery of the non-Euclidean spaces, the recognition of non-convergent equation systems which make men show philosophical humility, as his research results in more questions than answers

• to make this science accessible and sensitive to the largest possible number of people through the emotion caused by the beauty of images generated by those mathematics, independently of the level of knowledge of those who contemplate them

• to perpetuate and thus pay homage to man's genius that was deployed during these millennium to observe and imitate Nature, from fire to genetics; because fractals are also a search for the reproduction by mathematical formulas of elements present in nature, and generated according to the principle of autosimilarity: from the snowflake to entire landscapes

• the space of Mendelbrot has been selected for its historical place in the event of this new scientific way of thinking.

The proposed structural principle has the following objectives: the highlighting of the canopy essentially as a membrane, a coloured Filter dialoguing with the massivity of the stone architecture of the ground and the frame; a combined underlining of the bearing structure's lightness of the canopy with the extremely strong composition of the ground of the place. Four great masts replacing the former reverberators are used as support to a network of cables and wire meshes suspending a rectangular metallic net. This latter is composed of metal frames, being itself a support of laminated coloured glazing and supporting the normal forces in the membrane. The network of cables and wire meshes, actually not so visible, will be inspired by one or the other model of suspended or braced structure (here designed of tree shape). The membrane's charges will be supported vertically by the cables' network.

We insist on the process having led to the development of this project: it concerns a collaboration of groups on Internet between members of a multi-field team who joined for the project. Some know each other, some others not. They collaborated in conceiving, in different cultural and disciplinary spheres, a common project. Work was partly done with freeware, allowing transmission and representation of ideas of different natures and expressions, all on a basis of total freedom. This leads to create a work which, while using the most advanced technologies, returns someone to emotions which are, both universal and timeless, both physical and spatial. The resulting communicational work, based on themes of the begin and the end of the present millennium, proves the value of Internet as a tool for communication, research and collaboration, but never as a goal in itself.