Memory, Context and Dream Reality

Mark Dziewulski Architect

By its nature as a consciously created environment, architecture reflects our understanding of the patterns and ceremonies of life. Rational and conscious design enables us to create a differentiation / demarcation of space, from the sacred to the mundane, from cathedrals to marketplaces. Architecture provides a meaningful context, reinforcing our relationship with quotidian rituals and the emotions we experience. Design is the attempt to satisfy a need to differentiate these spaces.

Words like "home", "house" and "neighborhood" conjure up images. We dream of people and places. The designed world, and the unconsciously absorbed experience of it, provides a universal and collective memory that can be drawn upon to create architecture with resonance and meaning, at both visceral and conscious levels. An architecture that triggers expectations as well as memories.

I have developed an architectural expression that elicits an emotional response. I've intended to introduce both movement and sensuality -- composing forms, and volumes that are constantly changing relative to the perception of the viewer, a fluidity only revealed through the individual navigation of the structures.

Experimentation with sculptural volumes is a crucial focus -- generating interstitial spaces and the structural solutions required for their creation and integrity. These forms reflect a cosmological vision relating to the orbits of the planets, gravity as a centrifugal force, and the organic shapes found in nature.

Experimenting with the plastic and the free-form, I hope to go beyond architecture as a utilitarian response, and towards lyrical and rhythmic forms attuned to the realms of sculpture, dance and music. I endeavor to create buildings that elicit joy and delight. For example, for the Museum of Performance and Design in San Francisco I collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov to create a dynamic form expressive of the movement of dance and the energy of music. As Misha put it: "...a sense of energy similar to performance". This visceral language crosses the boundaries of culture, age and education, creating an architecture that can be read by all, a universal language embedded with meaning.

To achieve free-form sculptural shapes and complex curves, a calculated approach is required -- an almost obsessive attention to tectonics and engineering. Perhaps this has always been the case, as innovations such as the arch, the dome, the flying buttress, the Crystal Palace and the geodesic dome stem from structural ingenuity and the need to push materials to their limits.

My focus is on spatial intrigue, on volumetric experimentation, and an exploration of the sculptural and technical possibilities of materials: a spatial fluidity and plasticity responding to human scale and desire -- an architecture echoing visceral memories that we all may share.