Tempietto with a Courtyard
Tempietto Exemplum Exhibit, Yale School of Architecture
2018
It is well understood that Donato Bramante’s Tempietto is perfect–harmonious in form, geometry and proportion. This perfection renders the Tempietto as a powerful freestanding object, almost unreal.What is real however is the way the Tempietto exists within the cloister of the Chiesa di San Pietro. The courtyard is rectangular and the Tempietto is located slightly off-center in the long direction of the court. There is just enough space between the courtyard’s colonnadeand the steps at the base of the Tempietto’s peristyle for a few people to walk between.If one has not visited the Tempietto in person,a google search or Instagram hashtag will pull up numerous photographs, but to the avail of a single viewpoint. The view looks up at a seemingly encroaching Tempietto, one that looms large and establishes its presence against its tight enclosure. However, the idealized circular dimensionality of the Tempietto misaligned against unsimilar flat facades of a normative courtyard produces a tension that begs to be adjusted and synchronized. Rather than seeing this tension as an exercise of alignment, we were curious about the reciprocal consequences that the courtyard façade and the Tempietto have on one another. Could the pressures of context establish a different kind of tension–one that is suggestive rather than deterministic? Through digital imaging (which is a form of drawing for us) we examined productive errors to the Tempietto. A series of recursive steps are established that involve subjecting the Tempietto to orthographic projections of the courtyardfacades, reducing depth of new characteristics to near flatness, and superimposing emergent details with old details through varying degrees of alpha intensities.Resolution of errors such as irregular edges and glitches along surfaces are highly designed and manipulated to temper the Tempietto’s monolithic materiality. The Tempietto is made contingent to the courtyard and vice versa. The process is non-linear and reliant on our own aesthetic assessments on depth, shape, and texture to produce four snapshots of anomalous conditions between the three-dimensionality of the Tempietto and the two-dimensional courtyard facades.The concomitance of the Tempietto with a Courtyard offers uncanny representations of an otherwise definitive Tempietto in a courtyard.
Designers: Jackilin Hah Bloom, Florencia Pita
Team: Claudia Wainer