Choreograments

Choreograments began as Rasa Navasaityte’s diploma project at Studio Zaha Hadid in 2010 and continued as a research project of lab-eds until 2012. Its site is the Linnahall in Tallinn, a monumental Soviet-era hall on the waterfront whose vast, empty roof exemplifies the modernist landscape as a blank surface. The project proposes the opposite: a reactivation of the hall through a performative environment, rich in choices, readings and possibilities, into which the existing building is embedded.

The method is the choreography of collective events. Intensities of potential gathering are mapped over the site between the old town and the hall: the map of performance sets one function and one event a week against many small events distributed over the day, and a cross section steps the new ground from the street at 0.00 up to +17.85. Basic sub-elements are grouped into structural figurations by local rules, the field changes its light with the change of performance between day and night, and the variety of the environment emerges from below: a living scenery.

The second phase, Choreograments 2: Computing Tectonics (2010–12), turned the performative field into a question of construction. As a critical dialogue with the modernist notion of landscape, the elements extend the Bauhaus hierarchy of point, line and plane: the point, disposed over time in a field of locally negotiated densities, becomes a line; the line, extruded, becomes a plate; a plate and its orthogonal trajectory to the next plate in range form an L-shape; panels clad the L-shapes according to their local conditions, and a surface evolves from the assembly of object-oriented elements. In the physical studies this logic is tangible: folded paper elements lock into one another and hold a curve in the hand, and the diploma model, a long relief plate of the site, furrows the roof into ridges.

In 2012 the project received Austria’s Outstanding Artist Award for Experimental Tendencies in Architecture, a recognition award given in particular for its long-term research on autonomous architectural elements in parametric configurations. The jury read it as construction understood as a negotiation between autonomous elements aware of their neighborhood relations and dependencies, a performative landscape that can be molded by social, economic or functional parameters, and honored the visionary dispute within the research topic. The award was conferred in December 2012; the project was shown in the award exhibition at the HDA Graz and published in Wettbewerbe, Architekturjournal 307 (2012).