Levitas – The PLAN Journal, 2021

Levitas

A symbiosis between architectural space making – lines, emptiness, surfaces, form – and structural engineering’s underlying role in that space making through the use of geometry to deliver the stiffness of the form through tension.
The two anticlastic open grid-shell structures, appearing to lean against one another for support, suggest an arch – a window or door to the future – while acknowledging the mountains in the distance. This opening, and the voids in the grid shells, provide an opportunity to imagine beyond destruction, beyond the immediate entropic nature of life, and to appreciate nature from a new perspective.

If they were laid out upon the ground as two squares, one could count that each structure is composed of 784 spaces formed by the woven grid’s indistinguishable warp and weft.
Once in place, each of the 1,568 individual frames creates a unique window upon the environment, a picture frame view. As the shell’s angle of curvature changes so does the proportion of each opening visible to the viewer, and these openings also presents different opportunities to falling snowflakes and photons – sunlight. The more vertically inclined frames will become more closed to the sky, while the more horizontal frames will be more open. This will reveal itself in significant ways to the viewer, inviting them physically to engage with Levitas as well as look through from outside and from within it, while snow and sun will leave strange new forms and lines upon the ground below.

Intrinsic to the architecture and the art that I do is the idea that beauty is defined by non-linear behavior. By this, I mean the manner in which the work becomes part of nature, revealing this through change and the dynamic reaction to climate and weather – light, wind, water and earth. Levitas manifests this quality in many ways, some unpredictable, uncertain and surprising. It can be seen in the ever-changing composition of light and shadow that Levitas casts upon itself and upon the ground; its reflection in water, sometimes moved by the wind; in the way that leaves adhere to its lattice shells; how rainfall randomly changes the color of the wood strips forming the lattice shell; in the way that snow settles upon it, and how snow falls through its voids to create another level of topography upon the ground. This is non-linear beauty – the movement of infinity expressed by life.

LEVITAS

Hovering wings, emerging from the ground,
suspended in time, and folding
as if from vanished roots below
pulled up, a carrier of life, a framing.

Arte Sella’s work in the Val di Sella
captures the spiritual bond
between man and nature,
inviting, enrapturing, un monde.

And as we gaze,
we search for wisdom, memory,
through our awakened spirit of nature.
What does our mind see?

Imagining “Levitas” is to enable
the recovery of a meaningful symbol
of the everlasting cycle of life –
protection, restoration, humble.