Magic
fountain
Competition
of monumental fountain
Water writes always in plural (1)
The theme of the competition was the design of a monumental fountain for the most important roundabout in the Olympic Village at Barcelona. The site is located at the crossing of a new avenue linking the Sagrada Familia with the waterfront avenue and the sea. The brief stated that the proposed fountain would be equal in importance to the fountains built for 1929 World Fair: Jujol’s fountain in Plaza de Espanya, and the Magic Fountain on Montjuic, beside the Mies van der Rohe pavilion, the biggest fountain in the world.
The aim of this project is to create, not an objective unity like the Magic Fountain on Montjuic, where water, light and sound share a single aesthetic truth, but a dispersed, disseminated place, a ‘black hole’ that would invite endless new connections – a place for displacement of place.
The constituents – straight lines, curves and points – are drawn from the surroundings: the Olympic Village and combined as if they were a chromosome containing the information of the place, which is then grafted on to a part of its own fabric, simulating a reality which is transformed and distorts, but at the same time belongs to itself.
Fontana Mix, the graphic score composed by John Cage in 1957, which was also constructed from a grid, lines, curves and points, is used as a hypertext, or transforming choreography, for the place. It contains ‘ten transparent sheets with points, ten drawings having six differentiated curved lines, a graph (having one hundred units horizontally, twenty vertically), and a straight line, the two last on transparent material’. Given the similarities between the from of the Olympic Village and the Fontana Mix score, it is possible to implicate the first ‘text’ into the ‘chance’ movements of the second. Once the former begins to behave like the latter, all the syntactical articulations of the Olympic Village disappear. New connections, or ‘hieroglyphs’, appear. The two texts interact, creating a sediment of different layers, like a sort of tailor’s pattern, from which new figures are ‘cut’ out. It is impossible to recognize every single element; instead, we are confronted by fragments, or combinations of fragments. The fluid quality of the Fontana Mix curves introduces a sort of artificial geological accident, in which the temporality liquid state of the form is frozen. Liquid affects solid, as solid affects liquid.
The interior circle of the roundabout should be regarded, not as a frame, but as the perimeter of a microscope or magnifying glass, which reveals the nature of some of the ‘constellations’, or a world of hidden currents/constellations might appear outside the perimeter of the ‘microscope’, on Carlos I Avenue and in the park, as if they were splashes from the fountain, or peripheral spouts. The experience of driving along the avenues would be reminiscent of driving through farmlands in autumn, when the edges of the fields are burning.
The ‘geological score’ also regulates the spatial disposition of possible events: different types of water and sound. Streams of water, water curtains, light-lines, sprinklers, etc., will be alternated, concentrated or dispersed in the different figures. The aria, designed to be compatible with Fontana Mix, combines a series of sounds with different tonalities and rhythms, in five languages. The programme of the Carlos I fountain would be similar, distributing sound ‘constellations’ along the park avenue. The sounds voices, drawn from all over the world, would be capable of infinite number of combinations.
Notes:
( 1 ) The title of Duchamp’s first article in English “ * WATER
WRITES ALWAYS IN * PLURAL” published in The ( New York 1915)
