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In many of the works of the Belgian artist René Magritte, the ideas of disorientation, ambiguity and illogic are intertwined, complicating a question of representation. The image of reality is at once brought to the fore and coincidentally skewed back on itself. For Magritte, painting was nothing more than a visual riposte, not in representing the world per se, but instead it is an involuntary act of resemblance—a visual automatism.
As one of a select few primary elements in the composition of a building, the ceiling has a primordial, basic function: to provide shelter. The ceiling can enclose a dwelling, more as a means to an end, so to protect the inhabitant from any inclement weather. Or, in Ecclesiastical typologies it can become dominant, awe-inspiring and fearsome, and yet the idea of shelter still remains. A ceiling maintains a position well out of reach, a component not to be meddled with, nor requiring tactility. It is simply a device in the creation of enclosure and by almost subservient consequence defines the volumetric space of a building. In much of contemporary architecture, the ceiling is such a device, it is stripped of ostentation and is instead left as a state of passive, altruistic reverie. No longer the emissary of the divine or rugged, it is jaded, an element fading into the background.
At one point, however, the ceiling was the devilish cad, the trickster of Modernism. The painted white ceiling as an honorable subterfuge allowing for the definition of the double-height space was a definable characteristic for the Modernist era—a case in point would be Le Corbusier's Villa La Roche-Jeanneret (1923), where the treatment of the ceiling as a reflective surface opened up spatial qualities that promote the notion of looking beyond. The ceiling becomes a truly passive non-entity—even when it is there, it is not there at all. The obverse of this is when a ceiling is deployed proactively. An element that is thrust into the visual foreground of the built object, it pronounces the spatial, structural or decorative order. More presciently, it focuses the attention upwards. A comparative example to that of Le Corbusier's is Louis Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery (1953), with its hollow concrete tetrahedral space-frame, which functioned perfectly as both the flooring of one level as it did the waffle-slab ceiling construction on another. It is not a question of whether Le Corbusier's ceiling visually functions as background or Kahn's ceiling as foreground, but whether a ceiling can function as both. Where it alternates from the foreground, to the background and back again, fueling the idea that it functions as the fluctuating protagonist, both seen and unseen simultaneously.
Enter SANAA
Three prominent projects have sparked such a question: the Serpentine Pavilion (SANAA, 2009); the Rolex Learning Center (SANAA, 2010); and, the Teshima Art Museum (Ryue Nishizawa, in collaboration with the artist, Rei Naito, 2010). The Serpentine Pavilion follows a simple post-and-plane arrangement. Slender stainless steel columns hold up a simple thin aluminum and ply-composite roof. The complexity comes from the bending and curving both in plan and elevation. In plan the temporary structure reads as an organic flower or even a water drop, to proliferate the metaphor used by SANAA. In elevation, the roof continues this sense of the organic as it rises from flat plane ceiling, subtly undulating, and finally rising to its high point in one area so to open up views of London's Hyde Park. It is precisely this undulation that becomes characteristic. With the slope falling so low at one point that it becomes almost table height—viewed only from outside or by a small child from below—the ceiling allows for programmatic and spatial definition. It segregates. It is at once the provision of shelter and the divider of user and divider of space.
The surface of the roof begins to draw comparison with the work of Magritte. Its highly reflective aluminum creates a mirror on both the upside and underside plane, it is simultaneously recognizable as a ceiling plane and sheltering component in the structure but also comes as a visual continuation of the surrounding parkland. The sky and ground collide within this cosmetic application, in its reflection both sides of sky and ground are trapped, leaving the viewer a little bewildered as to where the structure begins or ends. The pavilion is a sheltered extension of the park; in paraphrasing the architects, it works as a field of activity with no walls.
The sky, by puncturing the domed ceiling plane, is brought into the building, it becomes the alternating piece in the conceptual fluctuation between foreground and background.
When embarking upon the design for Teshima Art Museum, Ryue Nishizawa made explicit reference to the previous projects although this time his collaborator was the artist Rei Naito (commissioned by Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation). The single volume gallery space is a cavernous dome that is entirely free of vertical support, the ceiling acting instead as both lateral, load-bearing support and shelter. The only apertures come from the two oval-shaped cavities that permit views skywards, creating a thoroughly unique art space. As a consequence, these ceiling vacuums allow the elements to penetrate the space, whether they be aural, visual or climatic. The ceiling is animated by the environment by the fact it is not entirely there; the sky becomes the foreground and enters the gallery space as the ceiling diminishes into the ground. In plan and section, the design for Teshima resembles a droplet of water. The globulous form is oppressive yet open, it stirs emotions of being outside and underneath at the same time. An overbearing Surrealist sense of being inside a droplet looking outward or viewing scalar objects from above. A removal of perspective and dimension. This project could well be likened to James Turrell's career-defining project Roden Crater, in the Arizona Desert, however, there is a reference that predates this. When viewing photographic imagery for Teshima there is an unmistakable, uncanny resemblance in the building's aesthetic appearance and disassociation of elements to the Surrealist works of René Magritte.
In all three projects, the ceiling plays the leading part in the definition and organization of space. In an interview on SANAA's projects whilst the Rolex Learning Center was nearing completion, Nishizawa described an evolution of their projects by shifting dimensional organization, by stating that "[we are] now working on the Learning Center project...here we have more three-dimensional changes, located outside of the two-dimensional wall."
At the Serpentine, the ceiling mirrors the ground aesthetically allowing it to fold into it at the sides. In the underbelly of the Rolex Learning Center the space is the residual effect of internal floor divisions through the topographical deviations, whilst the opposite is at play in the gallery space at Teshima, where the underneath becomes the inside. The Learning Center, however, acts as something of a conceptual bridge between the two projects that bookend it here. By allowing for the curvature to define the programmatic spaces, the building allows for what is in effect a double floor plate. The ceiling of exterior, 'underneath' spaces are crucial to the ground plane curvature of the internal, 'upside' spaces. There lies a duality of spatial definition, the floor and ceiling act separately, move organically and yet operate simultaneously. To label the Learning Center or Teshima 'natural', 'organic' or 'blob architecture', falling under the whims of contemporary architectural discourse, would be wholly inaccurate; they are referential to this type of terminology only by the fact that they are entirely unnatural. A continuous artificial entity. They are removed from their context yet entirely at ease with it. Furthermore, it is argued that SANAA have evolved Mies' Modernist concept of transparency and visual disappearance through the three dimensional use of the open plan.
In addition to spatial trickery, there is a heightened notion of perceived structural instability provided by the relationship between light and heavy ceiling elements in each of the projects. The remarkably large spans of the Learning Center cultivate a sense of perilousness for the user standing underneath, an idea replicated in the Teshima Art Museum through the cantilevered structure that emanates from the ground plane. To achieve such large spans in the Learning Center, a laser cut formwork system was fabricated to cast the concrete. At Teshima, concrete was poured over a built-up mound of soil. Once the concrete had set, the earthen mound was excavated leaving a domed hole behind. The construction equivalent of displacement. Both methods of construction allow for a sheen or smoothness—almost a softness. The finishing is exquisite, deflecting notions of the sheer weight carried by these spanning structural arches as they suggest impossible weightlessness. The Serpentine is a prime example. Its flimsy ceiling becomes a projection of the sky in the foreground and the background, constantly changing, shifting and expanding. Moreover, the thinness of the ceiling structure at Teshima is so veiled it becomes removed from its heavy formwork, its concrete materiality. It is almost the definition of 'paper architecture' in the normative sense of the term. The fragility of the structure exemplifies the notion and importance of the interplay between the building and the vanishing point where it touches the ground.
The ambiguity of the vanishing point facilitates a flux between what is perceived as foreground and that which is in fact background. Much in the same way Magritte subverts the order of things, SANAA have tampered with the sky. At the Serpentine the sky is a contextual collage as foreground, material objects are flipped and out of scale from their context; at the Rolex Learning Center the familiarity of the ceiling plane becomes a duality, functioning at once as sheltering element, planar component, and spatial divider in a large multi-programmed, open-plan building. SANAA are tinkering with more than just visual trickery, they are successfully experimenting through the programmatic play; and, at Teshima, Nishizawa falsifies the system of sky and building by amalgamating visual effects with the sky acting as foreground through the ceiling cavities, heightened by the diminishing planes. The sky, by puncturing the domed ceiling plane, is brought into the building, it becomes the alternating piece in the conceptual fluctuation between foreground and background. The idea of Magritte using the sky to disorient the viewer through using a recognizable pictorial image is akin to how SANAA make full use of the ceiling insofar as it promotes the concept of falling upwards—a notion of being at odds with perception and visual depth. Moreover, SANAA have evolved Mies' open-plan in the Rolex Learning Center, presenting a new role for the ceiling: a duality of functions, both the anterior and posterior element, simultaneously. In effect, the ceiling is functioning as Magritte's covert falsification of the order of things.
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