This is not the first time that the organizer of the competition, the Chicago-based ICARCH gallery, has presented architects with very original tasks: this is the design of the facade for the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, and projects of houses for various real and fictional personalities, including Faust, Ingmar Bergman and Albrecht Durer.
In this case, the task was to create a project for a new building for the museum-workshop of the great sculptor instead of the 1997 construction by Renzo Piano, located next to the Center Pompidou and included in its complex. The premises of Brancusi's Paris workshop have been reconstructed inside this structure, restrained in form. And it is the restraint, as well as its rectangular shape, that does not suit the organizers of the competition in this building: in their opinion, they contradict the very spirit of Constantin Brancusi's work.
The winner of the idea competition was the Viennese bureau Span, founded by young architects Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger.
Their project is based on the idea of restrictions that Brancusi himself imposed in the creative process: he could manifest this as a rhythmic repetition of volumes - as in the "Endless Column", or outlining curvilinear bodies - as in the famous series "Bird in Space". All these geometric bodies that make up his sculptures organically flow into each other through the beautiful lines of the "waist" of these volumes.
Brancusi's new studio building project continues this motive of self-restraint and explores its possibilities in a spatial aspect.
