Blog

A secret chamber inside a mass of stone for the Sam Jacob Studio hall.

Everything Flows is the contribution by Sam Jacob Studio to the Soul of the City exhibition conceived by Platform Architecture & Design and curated by historian and critic of architecture Luca Molinari. The resulting “marble pavilion” explores the relationship between the geometry of form and the characteristic features of stone material. The design plan starts off from a square divided crossways into four smaller squares chamfered at the corners. As in reaches upwards, four cruciform walls emerge from the base to define the external structure of the pavilion; their internal intersections are perforated by arched openings that in term form a vaulted central space. The chamfering at the base of the square creates four angular openings that reveal, along the diagonal, the contrast between the external and internal geometries of these mirrored chambers and their simultaneous separation and interconnection. The geometrical contrast is matched by a substantial variation of the decorated face of the stone: the outer shell is 3D boss-processed to geometrically reflect the roughness of the “raw” stone, while the internal chambers are honed and polished, almost as if to reveal a precious, fossilised architecture inside a body of rock.