The LADG
(thuh loss-ANN-ju-less duh-ZINE groop) designs new buildings for new kinds of families, gatherings, and uses. Like our namesake city, we take seriously the casual, the physical, and the ad hoc... more︎
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Year: 2017
Status: Complete
“A Cast of Things” is a model of a church in Osterhofen, Germany. The model shows the only upper part of the church, where the vaulted ceilings above the congregation are covered in frescoes that depict a heavenly city filled with people and life, as though entire habitable worlds are stacked atop the real space of the interior below. At one edge, it is cut in half to show the line where the real material of the vaults meets the fantastical space depicted in painting. Along the other edge, the outer walls and barn-like shed roof of church form a loose, unadorned enclosure that belies the form of the interior.
The real vaults of the church are modeled in cast plaster. It is solid and homogeneous. The worlds of the frescos above are cast too, but cast out of a promiscuous aggregate. Imagine a bucketful of things poured into a mold, as though clouds, bodies, drapery, and foliage were used instead of liquid. Pliant, soft things settle into corners and receive the imprint of the container, while others, more rigid, come to rest implacably, altered only insofar as they have tumbled into place.
And now imagine this aggregate is not so passive as to be simply “poured” into position without resistance. It has a structure, even an infrastructure: networks of pipes and tubes provide clear passage through the congestion; figures cluster and ascend heavenward in plumes of fat and drapery; caves filled with piles of raw material - like untapped veins of ore - give way to deeper recesses.
Team: Andrew Holder, Claus Benjamin Freyinger, See Hong Quek, Evan Org, Taylor Halamka, Kenji Hattori-Forth, Brad Silling, Milos Mladenovic, Adam Strobel, Matt Ozakawa, Jeff Burgess, Madelyn Willey, Madelyn Lenaburg, William Adams
Photographs courtesy of Spencer McNeil
